Turk Pride
by Tiger Rhodes
Summary: A ten chapter RenoYuffie piece featuring Reno after he leaves the Turks on less than pleasant terms. Will be updated twice weekly until completion, so check it out people! Completed.
1. Chapter One: Splintering Interests

*Twelve Months Ago*  
  
"You don't scare us... you ain't nothin'!"  
  
A single red eyebrow arched pointedly over a blood shot green eye, which glimmered from a mix of inebriation and mako treatments. A little further down the pale face, in the land of close shaved stubble and a pointed chin, a small smirk stretched into existence. Reno had been looking for a good fight for a long time, and although he couldn't pretend that this one had found him- billiards players were so touchy when you would pick up the eight ball and start tossing it to yourself, especially when they were playing for money- he was surprised at how promising things were starting to look.  
  
The Ferrari Union was composed of five men who could never afford such a car even if they pooled their respective salaries over the next decade, but that didn't stop them from bearing the gangs initials in massive print on the back of their beer stained leather jackets. While none of them seemed to be particularly formative on their own- Reno could briefly make out the outline of a gun under one of their jackets, but it appeared to be tucked so far back that he could easily put the man out on his back before he got it out, let alone cocked- they did make an impressive group, a quintet of drunken biker wannabes with long hair and, Reno surmised, short dicks.  
  
"Nothing?" Came a scathing reply a little from Reno's left, heated more by indignation than alcohol. Elena never had been much of a drinker, and even when she had agreed to go to the Last Call bar with her colleagues in arms she had made it quite clear that Irish Coffee was going to be the limit on her alcohol consumption for the night. Even though she was speaking with a tongue unaffected by booze, Reno promptly began to dread whatever sentence would come next spewing from the mouth of the blonde woman. Nothing could ruin a book back alley brawl like the prattling of a rookie. "Do you even know who you're dealing with?"  
  
Inwardly, Reno smiled, though his face remained locked in its painting of angry amusement. That hadn't been half bad, and if only they could take care of the irritated squeak that seemed to tail Elena like a heroin addiction they might just get her trained up to talk trash yet. Of course, that would mostly be left in his own lap, as Rude wasn't much for any sort of talking and their fearless leader simply couldn't get the correct blend of arrogance and insults going. Amateurs, Reno cursed mentally, would be the death of him.  
  
"Let's see," the soberest of the gang members began, holding out one hand as if to start ticking off some bullet points, but then trailing off as he stared at his fingers. Despite the fact that he was standing much steadier than his friends, it was clear that he too wouldn't take much harm from getting some food in him, and quick. "Blue suits... pretty eyes... and hanging around in the pissed soaked lower plates of Midgar like rats trying to swim to shore after their ship sank. You're the Turks."  
  
Oh goody, Reno muttered to himself, our reputation precedes us. Maybe next time we should send some business cards ahead in case those boy scouts Strife had instated as the Midgar police force happened to be in the area, the only thing they probably didn't have in their search for the former Shin-Ra task force being a phone number and address. The way the man had so easily identified the group had added a sense of urgency to the impending brawl that Reno didn't like, a calling for thoroughness that would take away from the fun of the whole thing. If anything could suck the soul out of a good fight, it was having to perform according to certain standards.  
  
"So you know who we are," Reno snarled, surprised at how slurred his own voice was starting to come across. So what that he had been drinking so much the last few weeks he could tell you what most of the city looked like through wet brown glass, he wasn't used to his tolerance level letting him down like this. "But you're still standing here, and your jeans are still dry." His eyes fell upon one of the men in the back, who looked so tanked that Reno would be surprised if he even knew that he was no longer standing in the bar, "Well, at least most of them are."  
  
"We ain't afraid of no has beens," said the biggest man, who appeared to be propping up the wasted soul in the back of the group, "especially not a group of micks, guttah trash and niggahs."   
  
Reno casually reached behind him, searching under his jacket, and felt his hands wrap around the cool rubber tipped handle of his EMR. Before he could ask which name in the list was supposed to apply to him, and silence whoever opened their mouth to answer first with a burst of electricity, he felt Rude begin to surge forward beside him. Though he knew ethnic slurs bounced off his friend like rubber bullets, Reno was also fully aware of how Rude responded to any sort of degrading comment towards his fiancee, and briefly felt a spark of pity deep down in his gut. It was vanquished quickly, but the fact that he had felt it at all left the red haired Turk wondering exactly what he had been drinking- and for how long.  
  
Watching the bald Turk advance, the big man slid out from under the dangling arm of his fellow gang member, leaving the man to stumble weakly against the brick wall of the bar for support as biggy surged forward, fire in his eyes. To Reno's surprise, Rude didn't just take the man off his feet with a simple palm strike to the throat, but instead kept walking until the two stood nose to nose, respective muscles rippling under very different attire. The big man leaned close and muttered something in Rude's ear in an attempted whisper, but amplification, one of the many side effects of a good night's drinking, allowed Reno to hear every word. "You punks got fired, broke, and taken out by a bunch of government boys. The upper plate made yah soft."  
  
Reeling just a bit from the phrase 'government boys', Reno took a few long strides forward until he stood side by side with his friend, drawing all the members of the gang who were still able to walk straight forward until they encircled the two Turks in a half circle. Reno fished for a response, realizing quite early that an explanation that 'Avalanche was only running Midgar affairs because everyone else who really cared to was dead' wouldn't cut it. "Let's just say we were in a slump," he said simply, "and besides... those 'government boys' of yours. They had one big advantage that you don't. They never had to face all of us."  
  
Driven both by his employee's words and an urge to get the talking portion of the evening over with, Tseng Chet appeared from the shadows of the alley with a click of highly polished black shoes. He hadn't sought concealment, but darkness seemed to find him like a stray puppy that would follow you around. The members of FU looked the pale man over thoroughly now that the sole light bulb in the alley illuminated his presence, but did not seem overly impressed, particularly the big man who seemed to be attempting to do the impossible in making Rude back away. "Oh, a chink, too. Beautiful. I guess we know why the Shins kept you around as long at they did... 'Turks' is a nice way of saying affirmative action."  
  
There was a slight jingle, almost too quiet to hear, as a long stream of linked chains slid from the clenched hand of Tseng and dangled down towards the ground, a small razor blade cinched at the end, shining in the weak lighting. For a brief moment, every eye was on it, and then the big man barked out a hoarse laughed, ragged from a smoking habit that existed since age seven. "Oh, look... he has a toy."  
  
Remy Windgrace, owner of the Last Call bar, lost a lot of business that night, when most of even his most dedicated alcoholics felt like going for a walk as the high pitched screams rose to a level they overcame even the blaring music from the jukebox. He thought about it as he closed up a good two hours early in effort to save heating money, and decided that maybe it would be best if he didn't go out back and complain.  
  
***  
  
Reno woke up with a sharp pain in his side and a pounding head ache in his skull. He figured out he'd been in a hell of a fight the previous night even before the memories flooded his mind, considering a right hook featuring a golden ring was one of the few things in the world that could cause him to rise in such a state. Other people would probably blame the almost lethal amount of alcohol he'd ingested, both before, after, and during the brawl, but he knew better than that. He hadn't had a hangover since he was ten and decided to race God in a contest to see what would be finished off first- himself, or the towering bottle of Vodka he had gotten his hands on. He wasn't sure why, but secretly entertained the thought that maybe that part of his mind had simply given up and committed suicide.  
  
The stabbing sensation in his left rib cage, however, he could do something about. With a mild groan, he laid his palm out across the dark maple wood he was laying on, and used it to roll off the desk he had passed out on- and more importantly, the jagged Shin-Ra paperweight which had somehow survived from the companies fall until now. Sickened by the blatant survival in the face of the odds, Reno considered smashing the instrument into pieces, but quickly let the idea pass as he heard a throat clear loudly and disapprovingly from above him.  
  
Blinking in surprise, Reno gazed up at the sitting figure of Tseng Chet, who had apparently made it to his desk early despite the obvious handicap of having a sleeping Turk on top of it. He had been using some of the open space to do paperwork on, and was now spreading it out liberally to fill the body shaped opening Reno's exit had left on the top of the desk. "You know," Tseng said, and the red haired Turk just knew that he was dying to cluck his tongue like some disapproving mother, "if you're going to be sleeping at the office, then maybe you could at least clock in on time."  
  
"...we don't have a clock," Reno said wearily, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. The simple pressure stung them horribly, and he idly realized he had left his contacts in untouched for upwards of three days. That, he mused as he reached into his back pocket and produced a black pack of cigarettes and quickly produced a cancer stick from its depths, was terribly unhealthy. He lit the small white cylinder with the half empty Bic lighter he had lifted off of one of the sprawled gang members the night before, but for some reason it tasted like death in his mouth. Maybe he should give that new liquid a try, that water stuff would probably do wonders for his condition. "Besides, I had a long night."  
  
"I'm well aware," Tseng said primly, gazing at him through narrowed eyes, "I happened to be there. I suppose I can over look the incident, however, considering the whole ordeal was a business venture."  
  
With no response readily available, Reno snorted and took another drag on his cigarette. It was better this time, and he quickly admonished himself for his near blasphemous thought of imbibing a non-alcoholic beverage. He turned away from Tseng with a simple roll of his eyes, but was frozen as his boss caught the gesture and barked out a very uncharacteristic, emotional word. "What??"  
  
Well, this had to happen sooner or later, Reno reasoned. He had been waiting for it to happen for some time, but rather thought the morning after such an entertaining show as the one they had put on last night wouldn't be the time or the place for this to happen. Oh well, he groaned in his head, lets do this properly. Maybe he'll do me the favor of gunning me down before I have to see it through to the ending.  
  
He whirled, his eyes blazing, his jaw working as if it couldn't wait to begin the speel he had played over in his head time and time again. All the reason and logic, all the facts and lists of defeat, the big painfully tragic equation that could have only one answer- the Turks were dead in the water, sitting ducks, kites that had just lost all their tailwind. Instead, in his typical fashion, he found himself reducing the entire conversation to two words. "Fuck you!"  
  
Tseng rose slowly, but there was no mistaking the flush that had darkened his cheeks. Though Reno had always been willing- hell, proud- to admit that he worked for a man with shark eyes, even the usually dead black pools were alive with anger as Tseng convulsively tightened his hands into fists, apparently wishing he had his hands on what Reno called 'his little lucky charms bracelet' right now. "Excuse me?" he hissed, though Reno was quite sure he had heard him loud and clear. He voiced something to that effect.  
  
"You heard me! A business venture? A business venture? A fucking business venture!?" Reno's voice rose sharply with each repetition of the phrase, until he was literally screaming at the top of his lungs as Tseng stood less then five feet away. "What kind of deluded, arrogant asshole are you? A business venture? We got in a *fight* Tseng. Do you really think rolling a couple of fat bikers is going to regain any of the credibility we lost when our founder company *fell down around our fucking heads*? I did harder shit than that when I was a Jackal, and we were a group of mal-nourished pissants!"  
  
To the credit of Tseng, he didn't react right away. To the discredit of Tseng, at least in Reno's eyes, when he did react it wasn't with a violent attack that left the two of them clawing feebly at each other from separate stretchers. Instead, the man he had once called his mentor spoke in a quiet, downcast, broken voice, the tone of a man who has lost everything in his life but his illusions and was having even them ripped away from him. "And what," he said slowly, "do you suppose we do instead?"  
  
"I suppose," Reno said with venomous pause, spitting each syllable out like hacked up tar from his well coated lungs, "that you should shove this up your ass. All of this. Your desk, your business ventures, and your fucking blue suit. Do you remember what you told me when I put it on? Do you?"  
  
Tseng's eyes gleamed once as the memory struck him, then went out, dying like wind swept candles. "I told you the only way you'd get to take it off was if you rotted out of it."  
  
"Well," Reno said, practically hissing his words, "consider that done. Everything I signed up to work for is gone. Money. Respect. Fear. We're jokes, Tseng. And you're the biggest joke of us all."  
  
And then he was gone, in a whirl wind of hatred and self loathing, storming out the office door. He ran into Elena halfway down the hall that lead to the offices exit, having to physically restrain himself from simply throwing her against the wall and using her like a toy, before tossing her down into the dirt. The thought sickened him, but for some reason, she sickened him more, and he sickened himself most of all. He marched past her and was gone before she could ask what that strange look he had given her could have possibly meant. 


	2. Chapter Two: The Thief Arrests the Kille...

There was screaming going on behind her, the disbelieving yell of at least four merchants who had suddenly realized that hundreds of gil worth of merchandise that they had brought with them to the market place was now gone. It was a sound that never got old- at least to the smirking cherub who had caused it, the common customers of the market who found themselves routinely questioned and searched might feel different about the situation. The thief cared even less about then she did about the shop keepers, because at least the keepers brought the goods she so skillfully snatched. Granted, if there were no customers, there would be no shops, so maybe every part of this equation was equally important.  
  
She paused for a moment, dwelling on it. The only answer she could think of was 'Fuck philosophy. I have some stuff to pawn,' and so she made her way down the back alley with all the wariness of a soldier walking through a tulip garden. Shadows danced, but she wasn't in the mood for waltzing, so she ignored them utterly, concentrating only on the weight of the assorted goods in her back pack. This wasn't exactly happiness, she reasoned, but it made a good substitute.  
  
Screams rose in volume behind her, but she ignored them, forcing herself to keep walking forward. From the sound of it, they had managed to peg someone for her crimes, probably some poor sap who had tried to walk away with a chica fruit or something and was about to get knicked for six or seven hundred dollars worth of theft. Guilt stabbed briefly at the true thief, but she brushed it off like she would a normal knife, with a stony face.  
  
Later, she wondered how things would have gone if she had just gone along with her original plan. Kept walking until she had made it into another marketing district, where they couldn't care less about where you got the goods you were selling- in fact, if they knew they had been stolen by a rival they probably would have tossed in a few discount items just as a thank you for helping lower the competition a bit. She wondered how much money she would have made, how many more trips back and forth she would have had to make before she had earned enough to buy that new chunk of materia the senator's wife had managed to dig up from her backyard when trying to start a garden that she would have, no doubt, instantly turned over to the house keeping. Instead, she had prompted her husband to start a full scale excavation mission that was being funded by an unbelievable price tag on the piece of red crystal.  
  
None of those questions, however, would ever be answered. Not because of any overwhelming conscience attack, and not because of anything special about the day or the market or the thief. It was, she would insist later, all his fault. At the time, however, she didn't even know it was a 'he' that had been caught. All she knew was what she had been told by one word that drifted down the alley from the marketplace.  
  
Turk.  
  
Spoken with score by some, awe by others, dislike by all and fear by a few with really good memories. For a brief time, the word had become a punch line among some of the more daring columnists for the international newspapers, but then reporters started disappearing and the joke had stopped being so funny to the rest. It could sometimes mean fun, but always meant trouble, and a certain level of danger came with uttering it in any context. An accusatory yell, the thief reasoned, brought potential damage somewhere between calling a Turk a 'baby rapist' or a 'nice guy'. Sighing, she turned, and began making her way back to the market a lot faster than she had left it.  
  
He was standing there, crouched down, a wolf surrounded by rabbits who were trying to outnumber him to the point they would be able to rip him apart with their tiny teeth. The dark red hair of the man, a color that couldn't possibly be natural but somehow was, seemed to reflect the mood of the crowd that had formed a semi-circle around him, essentially caging him against the brick wall he had to his back. For his part, he didn't seem unusually flustered, just stared calmly forward and threatened anyone who advanced with physical dismemberment.  
  
The thief started towards the growing mob, but before she could take three steps a pair of police officers emerged from the teeming masses, frowns on their faces and hands on the nightsticks that were strapped into their belts. Reno watched them coming with mild trepidation, but upon seeing the scars that laced the mans skin like spider webs the cops decided that this might be a good time to give diplomacy a try. The first one smiled, weakly, and held up both hands. "Hey there buddy, what's going on here?"  
  
"Buddy?" Reno asked coolly, not even giving the officer the courtesy of looking at him. Instead his eyes were on the furious shop keepers that headed the surrounding mob, as if daring any of them to step up and try to take back what they thought he had stolen from them.  
  
"Uh... well..." the police officer was flustered, which was not a good sign. Flustered men with nightsticks and pepper spray could often lead to an entertaining spectacle, but flustered men with guns was just begging for trouble. Luckily, his partner stepped in, his personality as slick as his close cut hair.   
  
"What is your name," he asked simply.  
  
"Turk," Reno replied, "don't you hear these people talking?"  
  
"Now, now," said slippery one, "let's not joke about anything like that. After all, no one here wants to deal with the hassle of trying to match you up with the dossiers put out on that band of criminals because you felt like being funny."  
  
"Who's joking?" Reno asked, finally looking at the cop. The thief wondered why the officer would even bother trying to convince a Turk to claim he was something he wasn't, that band was well known for wearing their sins like armor. Then it was with a startled jerk that the thief realized that the man was, for the first time she had ever seen, not wearing the standard suit that went with such a job. Instead, he was clad in nothing but black, from sneakers to pants to a dark leather jacket over an ebony wifebeater. Even the glittering piece of jewelry dangling from his left ear had a coal colored stone at the end. The improbability of this situation had the thief briefly wondering if the dead on resemblance this man held to the Turk she knew could have just been coincidence, but there was no way... he even blinked the same way. So slowly that sometimes it was hard to tell if he was even planning on opening them again, or just figured he could fall asleep where he stood.   
  
"All right," the cop said with a sigh, "if that's the way you want to do this." As he spoke, the man reached forward to grab Reno's wrist almost as if his last sentence counted as a declaration of arrest. The first cop began to reach for a pair of hand cuffs, but before he had touched them his partners hand wrapped around the wrist of the red haired Turk. There was a brief pause at the contact of skin to skin, and then Reno spun, driving his pointed elbow into his attempted captors ribs.   
  
The crowd gasped, horrified at the attack on a public servant, and the thief almost drew far too much attention to herself by barking out a laugh right there. These people apparently knew the word Turk, and kept up with the papers just enough so they could recognize one, but the obviously had no idea what the three men and one women- that were known of- were truly capable of. Assaulting an officer ranked just about on the level of a normal person's jay walking.  
  
In the time it took her to process this scornful thought Reno had reached into jacket and ripped loose his EMR, the only weapon the thief had ever seen that was capable of killing a man and popping corn... at the same time, no less. She wanted to call out some warning, not wanting the death of two government employees on her head, but apparently Reno wasn't in the mood to pull any trigger. Instead, he simply smacked the weapon across the jaw of the original cop, who just now was reaching forward from his handcuffs.   
  
The elbowed officer, recovering quickly from the blow to his side, drove forward with the full force in his body and striking Reno in the back of the knees, taking his legs out from under him. In a flash three or four men, seeing the immediate threat taken away, darted from the crowd fell upon the Turk and pinned him down to the ground. By the time the thief had reached the event, he had been securely cuffed, an act which apparently did not satisfy the man he had struck in the jaw with the EMR. The police officer ripped his pistol loose from its holster and pointed it directly between the Turks eyes, drawing only a blank stare from his captive.  
  
"Now Officer Malloy," the thief said quietly, but with a voice that carried. "Do you really think that's necessary? He is cuffed, after all."  
  
For a split second, the gun was pointed at her, the policeman reacting with surprise to the mention of his own name. Then the thief let her hood fall away, revealing her soft and attractive features, and the man lowered his gun as if pointing it at her burnt his hand. His face quickly turned the color of sour milk as he tried to stammer an apology for the moment of threatening. "M-Miss Kisaragi..." he mumbled, "I did not recognize your voice."  
  
"The prisoner," Yuffie reminded him primly, pressing her lips together, "is probably well enough detained without having a handgun pointed at his forehead. With the condition he's in, I'm surprised you even need the bracelets."  
  
That last line came from a closer inspection of the red haired Turk. Though it would have been hard to move with about six hundred pounds of rabble kneeling on your back, Reno wasn't even twitching, he simply tracked the progress of ants crawling across the ground with severely glossed over eyes. Something was wrong to him, something serious. Whatever substance, chemical or otherwise, that had driven him to his spurt of violence had just turned against his body in a bad way. If he wasn't on something, then something was on him, if that made any sense at all.  
  
"What are you arresting him for?" she asked suddenly, looking over at the police officers. They shared surprised looks, and the man who had first been struck spoke up.  
  
"Shoplifting will do for an arresting charge," he said quickly, but more than a little nervously. It wasn't often that one was charged with answering the daughter of the lord of the entire continent, and he wanted to make sure he got it right.  
  
"Someone saw him do this?" Yuffie asked.  
  
"Well, no," the man replied, scratching his head, "but he wouldn't let us search him, and since all of this stuff is missing, we assumed..."  
  
"Don't." Yuffie said bitingly. "Nothing good comes from assuming anything." Inwardly, she had to roll her eyes at the proper tone her own voice was taking, but on the outside her face didn't twitch. "No one here had a warrant for his search. That isn't an assumption, officer, that's a logical conclusion drawn from the fact none is present. Do you have any other charges?"  
  
"Yeah," muttered the second officer, rubbing his jaw, "assaulting an officer. Two counts. And aggravated assault. And hell, let's throw in assault with-"  
  
"Since I have been watching for some time, allow me to explain what went on here," Yuffie said shortly, "a man in apparently disoriented condition resisted being searched by force without a warrant. He was approached by two men who did not flash their badges, and was faced with attempted confinement under no declaration of arrest. It seems to me that not only could he easily get off on a self defense charge, but this incident might very well cost Wutai big in law suits."  
  
"Fine," the officer barked in reply, but incidentally checked his tone as Yuffie raised an eyebrow at his attitude, "uh, we still have him on admission of being a Turk."  
  
"Ah," Yuffie said softly, "but that is an international law, now a Wutain one. You two gentleman, as private police, should probably allow me to take him in to seek justice."  
  
"Uh..." the officers face fell, but he kept his anger checked behind a gritted set of teeth. Sensing the problem, Yuffie smiled compassionately and set a hand on his arm.   
  
"I will make sure you two get the proper credit for his capture," she said.  
  
"Oh... yes ma'am!" the officer saluted her, and was quickly joined by his partner. With a series of harsh gestures they removed all the shop keepers from their position on the Turks spinal chord and forced them back, dragging Reno to his feet and setting him down in front of Yuffie. "Will you need any help escorting him?"  
  
"I should be fine," Yuffie said quickly, as she dragged a stumbling Reno beside her. She left the police officers to explain to the people where they thought the stolen goods might have ended up and rounded the corner into the same alley she had first heard the commotion from. As soon as they were out of side, she let go of the dazed Reno and leaned against the wall, breathing hard. If she didn't deserve an award for that performance, she reckoned, there were actors who could put on a more realistic show than real life.  
  
"That was cute, kid," Reno said with a smirk, "you play grown up real well."  
  
Eyes wide, Yuffie gazed at a new man. Reno was now standing erect, his movements perfectly lucid, his eyes as alive and critical as ever. He seemed to be struggling with something behind his back, and a moment later Yuffie heard hand cuffs clatter to the ground, and the Turk began to rub his now free wrists with his now free hands. "What the hell?" she asked, at a loss for any other words.   
  
"Oh, you bought that?" he asked condescendingly. "Stoner look, or something close too it. I figured I could take on the cops, but a mob of pissed off merchants would be a little tough. I was gonna let them take me and just bust out from whatever half assed cells you people have here. You saved me the trouble, though. Thanks."  
  
With a simple nod, the Turk turned to walk off, stopped only by a quick hand catching him by the shoulder. He turned with very little surprise towards Yuffie, who was glaring at him, his own EMR pointed at his chest. He'd forgotten about that, and it would have been a shame to walk away without it. Not that this situation was much better. "What makes you think I'm going to let you go?" she growled at him.  
  
"...well," he said logically, "before I realized you had my beat stick there I figured it was just because there was nothing to do to stop me. I suppose appealing to your indecent side wouldn't help much here?"  
  
"I doubt it," she replied, "I really should turn you in. You are, after all, an internationally known terrorist... and on a personal level, I owe you a good ass kicking from the Midgar sewers."  
  
Reno's eyes widened in recognition at the mention of the battle from three years ago, and he squinted at Yuffie with an entirely new look upon his face. "The brat?" he asked in disbelief. "Well fuck. This is a whole new level of surprise."  
  
"My name," she said, "is Yuffie. What's so surprising about getting arrested by me in Wutai, anyway? This is my homeland."  
  
"Well yeah," Reno said slowly, walking a circle around Yuffie to her extreme discomfort, "but you look different now. Back then, you had legs and everything but you had the body of a twelve year old. I mean, I know your Wutain and everything, but from behind you looked like a guy. Now-"  
  
"-now," she interrupted angrily, "I am the acting next in line to be the ruler of Wutai, at which point I would be installed on the top floor of the Pagoda of the Gods. Unless you want to be hurled off the top of that six story building, maybe you should rethink what you were about to say. Turkey."  
  
He blinked. "What did you just call me?"  
  
"Turkey." She replied, matter of factly. "That is what you're called, right?"  
  
"Cute," Reno hissed back at her, apparently in no mood for talk of that sort. "But I'm confused. Are you going to let me the fuck go or not?"  
  
"I don't think so," Yuffie said firmly, shaking her head. "But I don't want to turn you in just yet either. I'm not a big fan on any laws forced on us from Midgar, even if I personally agree that you're a dick. I think I'll find a place to lock you up until I figure out what to do."  
  
Reno sighed, and reached into his jacket. Yuffie raised the EMR in warning, but the Turk didn't pull a weapon, instead drawing out a pair of battered black sunglasses that he unfolded and slid onto his face, hiding his blood shot eyes. "Goody," he muttered idly, briefly wondering how much it would hurt if he tried to rush her and she managed to zap him with his own toy. "Do you know of any good whore houses with the proper chains and bars?"  
  
"Probably," Yuffie muttered, "but that doesn't matter. I have a friend who is pretty paranoid, so his house should definitely have something that can hold you for a while. Follow me."  
  
Reno didn't speak again as they walked through the streets of Wutai, Yuffie ever keeping an eye on her mellow captive. He seemed content just to watch the people passing by, with a half amused look on his face, almost as if he knew some secret about each one of them that was exclusive to him. Not that it was a particularly long trip, but Yuffie still found the silence somewhat unnerving from a man she knew to talk a blue streak even as he was being punched in the face.  
  
She was much further unnerved, however, when they reached Shake's house, and they found the door to be half open. The Shake she knew was a genuinely nice, but incredibly twitchy guy, who could read a conspiracy on a box of cereal. Hoping that basic curiosity would overcome any particular need for freedom, Yuffie left Reno and sprinted inside, hoping desperately that whatever might have happened was still fixable.  
  
Idly, Reno followed her inside, but took his time in doing so. She was already out of sight, winding her way through the house, but he figured he could follow the sound of her footsteps. His plans were faced with a serious problem when, almost as soon as he'd set off, the steps stopped, and it took him quite a while to find her. When he did, she was standing perfectly still, her shoulders slumped, her eyes wide in horror. The Turk glanced over her shoulder and winced, even a hardened killer such as himself surprised.  
  
"Maybe he was right to be paranoid," he observed, reaching forward and plucking his EMR from Yuffie's listless grip, an act which she didn't even seem to notice. "I mean... that is a *lot* of blood." 


	3. Chapter Three: The Vigilante Turk

"I can't believe this," Yuffie was pacing, and if Reno had known her personally for more than an hour he would have realized how out of character this was. Instead, he simply watched with mild interest from the bed on which he sat, a half eaten piece of jerky clenched in his hand, his EMR lying temporarily forgotten beside him on the bedspread. You didn't need to interact with the Wutain girl on a regular basis to tell she was upset, and so the red haired man kept all of the dozens of sarcastic remarks that were running through his head tightly in cheek. "I should have knocked you out and turned you into my father as soon as I could."  
  
That set off alarm bells, and with a slight frown Reno quickly scanned over the current situation in his mind, wondering what exactly could have set off such an off topic sentence. "Excuse me?" he asked, when no reasonable solution presented itself, and briefly he wondered if he should have punctuated that question with a quick blast from his nightstick. It didn't matter that he really had nowhere to go, or that the grown up form of Yuffie Kisaragi had legitimately impressed him, when someone started lamenting not locking you up it was time to get on the move.  
  
"Like you don't know," the thief snapped at him, and continued pacing.   
  
Indignation flared in Reno. He didn't care so much that she didn't deem him worthy of an honest answer- or a dishonest one, at that- but the fact that she didn't even stand still to let him know how the situation stood was going a bit far. He had, after all, been courteous enough not to bash her brains out with his EMR the second he had snatched it from her hands, and he'd even stayed with the body while she went to alert the authorities. Not that was such a big thing, Reno often preferred the dignified silence of a corpse to the mindless prattle of the living, but a favor was still a favor. "I don't," he responded angrily.  
  
If nothing else, that stopped her in her tracks, but the look she shot him wasn't exactly full of sudden kinship. She was seething. Reno didn't think he had ever seen her so mad, even back when she was tramping around with the vigilante gang and it had become clear that the majority of his offense was dedicated to trying to knock that stupid looking arm guard off of her. He considered withdrawing his statement, but figured nothing good would come from replacing a two word exclamation with a lie.  
  
"You don't know what?" Yuffie snapped at him, her eyes glittering dangerously, and Reno found himself glad that she had dumped off most of her fighting gear when they had stepped through the doors of her home. "You don't know what sort of weapon your fucking friends used? You don't know how long it took for him to go down, how much it hurt? What don't you know, Reno!?"  
  
Yuffie paused, realizing she was shouting, but figured that if there was any time to pursue the issue it was this. Something seemed to be genuinely confusing her seemingly uncaring captive, and there was a good chance that she could press that to get some information. He opened his mouth to answer, apparently used to or otherwise unfazed by being screamed at, but Yuffie cut him off with a quick wave of her hand. "This is so stupid!" she yelled, practically shrieking. "Why are you even still here? I've turned my back on you a dozen times, even left you alone with Shake, and your still sticking around? What, are you supposed to report back to your boss what affect the hit had on me? Were you sent to distract me while this went down, and your waiting for some sort of signal to call you back?"  
  
As she spoke, Reno's eyes grew progressively wider, and as she began to wind down he lept to his feet, holding his hands out in front of him like a shield. The piece of jerky dropped down to the ground as he began to speak, softly at first, but getting louder until he managed to override her tirade. "Woah, woah, woah," he said, "*woah*. How 'bout we back up, here? That guy... Shake?... was shot with a handgun. It wasn't quite a .44 Magnum, but it was close enough that it doesn't really make a difference. Its basically a compact cannon. The basic laws of gravity dictate how long it took for him to go down, and for how much it hurt... well, it didn't. The bullet hit him in the back of the neck, blew his spinal chord apart, and went at an angle up and through his jugular. It took a while, but he shouldn't have felt much of anything as he died."  
  
He took a step forward towards Yuffie who seemed to be frozen, looking as if she was about to be physically ill. She had her hands raised as if she had meant to claw his eyes out if he said the wrong thing, and he gently grabbed her wrists and lowered them down to the standard waist level. "Now," he said, practically whispered, but all of the sudden he was the one with an edge in his voice. "What's all this bullshit about me distracting you, and a boss I'm supposed to be reporting something to?"  
  
"Bullshit?" Yuffie asked, after she took a moment to regroup from Reno's rather gruesome details about what had befallen her friend. "Is that what you call this? Bullshit? Is that all this means to you?"  
  
"Is that all *what* means to me?" Reno cried, genuinely rattled, sick of having no idea what the thief was talking about.   
  
"You killed someone!" Yuffie exploded, putting both of her hands on the man's chest and shoving. Caught by surprise, Reno stumbled a step back, but steadied himself on the bed post before he went tumbling to the floorboards. He narrowed his eyes, but left his EMR untouched on the bed as he crossed his arms over his chest.  
  
"Yes," Reno said cooly, "I have. But not Shake. Think about it, brat," he said, going with the label he had slapped on her even in this tense situation. "You found me in the market place. When we found your friend, he wasn't even cold. Even if I was stupid enough to go out into public after I... what? Hid a gun, changed clothes, washed up? Even if I was stupid enough to go out after all that do you really think there would have been enough time to get arrested, and drug back here before he stiffened up?"  
  
Again, Yuffie recoiled at his graphic terms, but recovered much quickly this time. "I'm not stupid, you know!" she hissed at him. "Don't you think I know that you don't work alone? I don't care if you didn't pull the trigger, you know who did and you're still a murderer!"  
  
It all hit Reno in a flash, and he would have laughed out loud if it wasn't for the painful barrage of images the realization brought to him. Pictures, voices, little memory movies from over a year ago, and any time in the decade before that. The Turks, Shin-Ra, Rufus, a hundred people he'd killed, a million crimes he'd committed, pools of blood that had either been spilt by his hand or by his orders. The life that got away, except he had been the one who had left it. And then he thought of Avalanche, of Spike the farm boy and Tits, that brunette Rude had been so fond of. And then he thought of Yuffie, who had at the time been nothing more than a slip of a klemptomaniac, and came full circle to the present.  
  
"So you think that just because I'm in town and something bad happens, the Turks are responsible for it?" Reno asked quietly. Inwardly, he was surprised that the organization still had enough fame to its name that their very presence brought on thoughts of crime. "Well I have a news flash for you, brat, that's not my gig anymore. Hasn't been for a long time. I left the blue suit behind over a year ago."  
  
That gave Yuffie legitimate pause, but she came right back at him, teeth bared like an animal ready for battle. "Oh, please," she growled, "you really expect me to believe that? You just happen to be in town when your old colleagues pull a hit, less than two miles from the crime scene? Haven't I told you how stupid I'm not?"  
  
Reno's mind worked. She had made a good point, but there was something missing here, some broken link that made the whole thing absurd. Then it came to him, his second bolt of inspiration in the conversation. "Aren't you forgetting something?" he asked, surprised that he was actually relieved to have come up with a good counter to her accusations.  
  
"What am I forgetting?" Yuffie demanded, acid practically dripping from her voice.  
  
"You think the Turks did it because I'm in town," he started, "and you think that I'm still a Turk because I was in town when they did it. The only problem here is, since I'm not on their line up anymore, there's nothing even connecting them to this!"  
  
Well, Reno reasoned, at the very least she looks off her guard. The problem was, she wasn't afflicted with the sudden stunned revelation that he had provided for her, and instead seemed to be trying to work out whether he was lying, crazy, or both. Usually that sort of question about himself would make Reno grin like a Cheshire cat, but he was currently in no mood for games.   
  
"I don't think that the Turks did this because of you, you arrogant prick," Yuffie suddenly burst out, "I think they did it because you... *they*... admitted it."  
  
"...what?" Reno asked slowly, hoping the single word would be enough to carry over the dozens of other questions he had in mind for the situation. She'd found Tseng, Rude, and Elena? Talked to them? When? And why in God's name had they been stupid enough to confess to murder? It had been with absolute admiration that Reno had watched Tseng deny, without blinking, that it had been him who had stolen a katana from the local weapons shop *while he held it in his hands*, and they'd come clean for this?  
  
"They left a fucking calling card!" Yuffie cried, producing a soggy piece of paper from inside her clenched fist and answered all of Reno's questions in one fell swoop. Technically, it was a business card, or had been when any of the information on it was accurate. The Turks had used these back when their office was in the Shin-Ra basement, before Meteor had caused Shin-Ra to cease having a basement. It was soaked in sticky red blood that now stained Yuffie's palm. "This was pegged to the inside of his damn door!"  
  
Reno continued to read the card, over and over again, in disbelief. Names, a phone number, address of the Shin-Ra building but no specific co-ordinance given. "It's bullshit," he finally managed, shrugging his shoulders as if seeing the card hadn't shaken him up half as much as it had. Talk about ghosts...  
  
"What's bullshit??" Yuffie demanded.  
  
"That card," he responded. "Even if we... they... still stayed in that building. Even if we still had that phone number. Fuck, even if we could still afford to have something like that printed up... we wouldn't. Do you really think I'd still be alive if we made a habit of broadcasting every job we did?"  
  
"So, what," Yuffie asked, "someone is trying to set the Turks up?"  
  
"Set them up for what?" Reno asked bitterly. "Any big elaborate joke anyone wanted to play on the Turks reached its punch line a long time ago. Ha, fucking, ha. Anyone who hated us... them... would get a bigger laugh out of watching us swim in the piss of the slums than rot in jail."  
  
"Things are that bad?" came the response, a surprised question.  
  
"Probably worse, now," Reno muttered, shrugging and turning his back on her as he walked over and returned to his spot on the bed. "I didn't exactly leave a forwarding address when I walked out, and the funny thing about downward spirals is that a you aren't going to be waiting the problem out."  
  
"So who *would* leave a card like this?" Yuffie asked, then quickly amended her statement. "Not that you've really convinced me I was wrong in the first place."  
  
"Jesus," Reno exclaimed, "why don't you just give me a badge so I can do your police forces job for it?"  
  
"You aren't doing anyones job," Yuffie snapped menacingly, "you're keeping your ass out of a prison cell by offering a reasonable alternative."  
  
"Good point," Reno said, then thought it over for a moment. "Smoke screen. Whoever tacked the card up apparently realized that you people would be gullible enough to believe the simplest answer was the correct one. So when you go over a group of people who might not even work together anymore, they skip country and go fuck some foreign broads."  
  
The word 'foreign' seemed to spark some curiosity within Yuffie. "Where are you from, anyway?"  
  
"Born and bred in the slums, baby," Reno replied, and then snapped at her. "Why?"  
  
"Well," she said, rising to meet his tone, "I need something to fill in on your arrest file."  
  
"Cute," he muttered, but when she didn't crack a smile Reno decided to go another way. "Do you know what I'm going to do for you?"  
  
Yuffie snorted, as if she didn't believe him capable of helping her out in any way, shape, or form. But, of course, like everyone in the world when faced with a random offer of aid, she was interested, and eventually her inner indignation won over. "What? What are you going to do?"  
  
"Exactly what I said earlier," he said with a smirk. "Your police force's job."  
  
"Oh, what," Yuffie demanded, "you're going to find out who killed my friend?"  
  
There was no sense of a joke in Reno's next words, no hidden mirth or even hint of mockery. "Yes," he said simply, "I am." 


	4. Chapter Four: Failed Efforts

"Yeah, well you know what, Hector?" Reno shouted into the cell phone, face currently flushed almost as red as his hair. "I don't give a damn how many federal agents you have monitoring your calls! I don't care that he's sitting right there! What color is his hair? Blonde? Its Gary, isn't it? Yeah, I know you can't say. It's Gary. You tell Gary to sit down and shut the fuck up, or he's going to get a repeat of the summer of '93. He'll understand."  
  
Reno paused, listening for a few moments, whatever the person on the other end of the phone telling him apparently not helping his mood any. "Yeah, I guess I did just tell him myself," he replies sharply, "and he didn't do it. Fine. We'll see what happens next time you want some quality Fort Condor armory shells."  
  
With an angry growl, Reno threw his phone down, not really caring that he missed the counter by a good foot and the device shattered against the tile floor of the room like a shot glass. Lord Godo was footing the bill, after all, and it had been a long time since he had last been able to recklessly destroy material. It felt good. Before he had broken a co-workers neck in a scuffle over a last doughnut and transferred to the Turks, Reno had after all been a member of the sweep forces that made sure things didn't get too pretty in the slums. He hadn't even realized that such a position existed until he'd been offered the job, but it had explained so much to him when he found out about it that his knees had almost buckled.  
  
He produced another phone from the crate on the counter to his left, a resource provided by Yuffie, who had apparently anticipated Reno's less than orthodox way of handling things. He flipped the cover open and dialed hastily, not even needing to pause to remember the digits he had last dialed half a decade ago. No ring came from the other end- it wasn't that sort of a number- but a static filled hum told the former Turk that he had gotten through just fine. After a pause that was just long enough for tracking equipment to pick up the source of the call, there was a click, and a deep raspy voice came booming into Reno's ear, talking rapid fire like a machine gun with a stuck trigger.  
  
"Halo's house of Bibles, whattaya want, whattaya need, what can I do for ya?" said the man, his words surprising Reno to the point it took the man a few seconds to answer.  
  
"You sell Bibles now?" Reno demanded in disbelief.  
  
"It goes with the name, mommy," came the reply, "it goes with the name. What can I do ya for?"  
  
'Mommy' was a name that stemmed from a job so old that all of the Shin-Ra executives who ordered it done had managed to escape the destruction of Meteor by retirement, and was one of the first missions Reno had been sent to take care of alone. Some grandchild being held for ransom or the like, and even though the people behind the orders seemed a lot more infatuated with the disposal of the kidnappers than the safe return of the kid, Reno had busted him out without a scratch on him- but not without a little help from Halo, and his seemingly infinite supply of explosives.  
  
"This is a secure line, Halo," Reno said slowly, apparently unable to get over his original greeting from the man. "Why the hell are you using a Bible selling front from here?"  
  
"Times are tough, man," came the reluctant response, and then Halo trailed off, sounding somewhat embarrassed.  
  
"You're actually selling Bibles?" Reno asked incredulously.  
  
"...what do you want, mommy?"  
  
"Information, man. Low profile stuff, so I won't hold it against you if you don't know..." Reno let the open challenge hang in the air, and after a moment of digesting it Halo decided not to take the bait, and the next time he spoke it was with a guarded tone.  
  
"I sell bombs, not bombshells, mommy," came the answer. "How the hell many people have you tried already?"  
  
Reno glanced at his watch. His usual work ethic of putting things off tomorrow had caught up to him when, after a fitful nights sleep, tomorrow had finally come with a vengeance. He'd started pulling strings about an hour after he'd woken up, and he'd had two meals and taken about three dozen smoking breaks since then, with his efforts yielding no solid answers. "Enough," he said simply into the phone. "So can you help me? I need to know who pulled an assassination in Wutai, one of the Pagoda fighters."  
  
"Someone offed one of the Wutain clan leaders?" came the answer, sounding genuinely surprised. Reno sighed and lowered the phone for a moment, deciding that Halo probably didn't need to hear the stream of curses that escaped his lips. After he had vented for a minute or so, he lifted the phone again, no longer slightly interested in anything his old associate had to say.  
  
"So that's a no," Reno said, not asking a question.  
  
"Sorry mo-" but the phone had already been switched off. With a reasonable amount of self restraint, Reno stopped himself from smashing it to bits, but that didn't save it a nasty dent as he slammed down onto the counter in front of him. Halo had been right in asking exactly where he fell in the information chain, because in normal circumstances Reno wouldn't have even considered contacting the man unless he needed to reduce something very big to several somethings that were very, very small.   
  
"So this is how you work your magic."  
  
Reno didn't even need to turn around to look, the bubble gum dipped in venom voice would be haunting him in his sleep for years to come, so he certainly didn't need visual confirmation to tell that it came from Yuffie. He didn't know how long she had been standing in the doorway, or how many calls she had listened in on, but frankly one was too many. Failing was one thing, Reno could deal with that... to a point. Failing in public was an entirely different matter. It was, after all, what had driven him away from the group of people who he'd fully intended to be the ones who drug his body into a river one day.  
  
"You know," he muttered slowly, "considering it was one of your friends who was killed, I'd think you'd be less of a heinous bitch about it."  
  
"Yeah, well," Yuffie said, walking across the room and hopping up onto the counter, "watching you destroy phones is a nice distraction. You really haven't found anything?"  
  
'She's been here since the phone thing?' Reno groaned inwardly. Maybe killing her would be easier than dealing with this, even considering the way that would count as officially declaring war on an entire independent nation. Personally, he was more than a little surprised at the repeated failure or unwillingness of everyone he had tried to contact that day. It went far past coincidence and ventured into the stomach churning fact that people had finally started to catch on that over the last few years, all of his talk had been reduced to just that. He had rather hoped to have caught a bullet before this came around.  
  
Instead of vocalizing any of these thoughts to Yuffie, however, he simply pressed his forehead down to the counter and groaned. "You know," he said after an extremely uncomfortable silence, "if it wasn't for that the fact that to get to Shake the killer had needed to bust through a bank vault level of security, I would think that this entire thing was a random occurrence."  
  
"So you called everyone?" she asked slowly.  
  
"Yeah," he admitted, "sorry brat. I put out all the bait I have and there were no bites."  
  
"I bet you say that a lot after you go clubbing," Yuffie supplied, unable to suppress a grin.  
  
"Fuck you," Reno replied sagely, but even he cracked a smile... or at least what passed as a smile with him. He couldn't believe he had left that door so far open for her to walk through.   
  
"No, really though..." something seemed to be troubling Yuffie as she spoke, she wasn't looking at him. "You called everyone?"  
  
Reno looked up irritably and turned to snap at her, "What the fuck did I just say?" he demanded, but caught her meaning instantly by the look in her eye. He watched her steadily for a moment to be sure, and when an almost guilty look broke over her face he was given his answer. "Well... not everyone."  
  
"So call them!" Yuffie burst out, "You worked together for years, and if anyone would know about professional hits it would be the Turks."  
  
For a long time, the two sat, staring at each other, Reno trying to formulate and answer and Yuffie waiting for him to do so. When nothing came to him, he simply slid off his chair and turned his back off her, making his way towards the very doorway she had come from. She didn't let him walk away- and he hadn't really expected her to- but even he was surprised as she grabbed his arm and spun him around, almost sending him off his feet.  
  
"What?" he snapped, after he had established that he wasn't about to plummet face first into the floor.  
  
"Why... don't... you... call... them..?." Yuffie sounded out through gritted teeth. She couldn't believe he was making this whole thing so hard. She was the one who had saved him from prison, and even now was keeping him free even though they had found a blood stained Turk card at the scene of a murder, and for some reason she felt like the one who was being detained, trapped in a room with a belligerent smart ass who seemed to regard himself as her older brother and not her captive.  
  
"It isn't that easy," he said simply.  
  
"Oh yeah?" she challenged. "What's so hard about it?"  
  
"Look," he growled, trying to explain, "I'm not sure how familiar you are... or aren't... with the basic set of rules that comes with being a hitman, but the fact I'm standing here right now is a fucking miracle. I wasn't laid off from the Turks, we didn't mutually agree to part ways. The only reason they haven't tracked me down and killed me just because that's the usual protocol is because they simply don't have the resources to do so. You want me to call them up? I don't care how down things are, Rude could trace a phone call with a picked apart alarm clock."  
  
"Do you really think they would try to kill you?" Yuffie asked.  
  
"Look where I am," Reno countered, "do you really think I would be hanging around in Wutai if I thought there wouldn't be crosshairs on me in Midgar?" Yuffie shot him a scathing look and went to say something, but he raised his hands defensively and continued onward before she could. "Hey, this is my second choice, but even you can't pretend that this place contends with the big city."  
  
"Sure I can!" Yuffie insisted, then pausing, thinking her own words over. "I mean, it can... it does! Anyway... I saw you and Rude talking in Gongana! He's, like, your best friend. I don't care what set of stupid ethics apply, friends don't shoot each other."  
  
"Brat," Reno said, shaking his head in legitimate disappointment, "if that was true, I would never have had a job. Friends, neighbors, family members... blood is thicker than water, but mako is thickest of all. And mako means money."  
  
"They must have had one hell of a severance package then," Yuffie said only half-jokingly, "if you'd risk a bullet in the head just to get out."  
  
Reno snorted. "I'm not one for change, in case you haven't noticed. I definitely didn't unseat everything in my entire life because I was hoping to gain a little more. I left because it had all become... wrong."  
  
"You've been killing people for years, and it suddenly became wrong?" Yuffie asked, raising an eyebrow.  
  
"Not that," Reno chided her, "I'm not saying offing people is a bed of fucking roses or anything, but it gets a hell of a lot easier with time, not harder. We started making less money for doing harder jobs, and our reputation began to slip. When I was a Turk, I breathed it. I'd get off on the way people would look at me when they saw me in the blue suit. I can stand killing people, I can't stand being a punch line."  
  
"So you aren't only an asshole," Yuffie said, sounding disgusted, "your a vain asshole."  
  
"Basically," Reno responded, grinning.   
  
"So does that mean you'll call them?"  
  
"Did I say that?" Reno blinked.  
  
"No," Yuffie admitted, "but you are going to, aren't you?"  
  
Reno sighed and turned away, glancing around the room in disgust, as if searching for some mirror to drive his fist through, daring the porcelain vase in the corner to be shiny enough to reflect his image. "I'm going to ask them for their help," he said quietly, "but calling them isn't going to cut it. The only way I'll be able to avoid taking a slug to the throat is meeting them face to face and just getting everything out in the open." He noticed Yuffie giving him a profoundly strange look. "What?"  
  
"You're going pretty far for this," she said, "how comes?"  
  
"Why not?" he responded quickly.  
  
"Oh come on," she complained, "lets skip over the bullshit answers, OK? If your right about what they might do to you, then I don't understand why you just agreed to get in touch with them."  
  
"We made a deal," Reno said simply, "I find the people that killed Shake, I get to walk around without wearing stripes. That makes this a job."  
  
"I don't remember agreeing to that," Yuffie said suspiciously. "After all, even if you aren't a murderer... well, the murderer who killed this particular person... you're still a Turk. That's an occupation punishable by prison."  
  
"I keep telling you," Reno snapped, glaring at her, snatching up the phone once again, "I'm not a fucking Turk anymore. Yesterday with those cops, I was messin' with them, OK?" He didn't dial much, just one button, and with a series of beeps the cell phone repeated the same numbers her had entered in earlier. There was the same static hum, the same pause, but this time there was a very different greeting.  
  
"Yeah, mommy," came the irritated voice of a man who had just tracked two phone calls in a row to the exact same location, "I haven't found anything out in the last two minutes."  
  
"Yeah, I figured," Reno said tolerantly, "there's something else I need. Let me know the last place the Turks were seen, will you?"  
  
There was a long pause at the other end, but not because of any technical reading being done, just sheer apprehensions. With mild amusement, Reno wondered what Halo thought he was going to try to pull off with the following information, and he figured the munitions salesman was weighing the potential backlash of not telling him against the potential backlash of doing so. Apparently the religious text dealer feared bursts of electricity more than flying bullets, because at last, an answer came. "Well, mommy... they're in Wutai." 


	5. Chapter Five: Another One Bites the Dust

"You have no idea what you're getting yourself in for," Reno hissed quietly, his eyes narrowed in challenge as he stared across the table at his unworthy opponent. The smoky atmosphere made his eyes water like a punch to the face, but that wasn't enough to make him drop his gaze from the hateful stare of his adversary.  
  
"I've seen you in action," came the heated reply, the brashness somewhat tainted by a mild sputtering cough that bubbled up towards the end, "and you wouldn't scare me less if we were in the middle of a knitting contest." Fingers hung poised in the air, wavering, ready to swoop down and grab their weapon of desire and throw it into action, hovering just seconds before an attempt to blow the other away.  
  
They both reached down at the same time, snatching a shot glass from the wooden surface of the table and bringing it up to their lips, tossing it back with a single flowing motion. The harsh alcohol raced over tongues and down throats, and while the former Turk took his like water it ended up catching somewhere between Yuffie's lungs and her tonsils and she nearly choked as she felt the fiery liquid go to work on her insides.  
  
"What are you, a maso?" Reno asked calmly, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Yuffie glared at him, but clearly felt that opening her mouth would be asking for a second stream of hacking convulsions and was forced to be content to speak her mind with her seething gaze. Deciding to take this as an inquiry, Reno just shrugged and turned to look around the bar, a half smile on his face that he always wore when located in his home environment. "I'm just saying, you weigh all of three pounds, and you challenge me to a drinking contest."  
  
"Three pounds?" Yuffie asked after she had regained the ability, "I'm not sure whether I should be blushing or offended. That is sort of bordering between flattery and-"  
  
"-it was a compliment," Reno cut her off gently, "sort of. Let's leave it at that."  
  
"Hm," Yuffie mused, "so why did you pick this place, anyway? There's a great bar just down the street from my house."  
  
Inwardly, Reno was wondering why he had chosen any place at all. The fact was, he had wanted to get out and about, cabin fever was hitting him hard cramped up in the thief's place. The problem was, she was still insisting on going along with this notion that he was her captive, even though the way she kept dozing off in front of him while he was carrying his EMR probably won her the award for world's worst warden. Thus, he would have had to drag her along if he wanted to go outside...  
  
...so why exactly had he gone into his old routine when bringing the venture up? He didn't figure himself as a guy who was easily surprised, but he had stunned himself when he'd managed to ask her out instead of requesting a brief leave from encasement. Not as stunned as she had been, granted, but after she'd ensured that the place he wanted to take her to was in no way a brothel, strip club, or other kind of prostitution ring she had readily agreed.   
  
"That dive?" Reno asked derisively. "If I felt like some candy and hop skotch... that still wouldn't be the first place I went to. I wanted a drink, not a fruit drink or a daiquiri or an extract. That place is a set of glow sticks away from being a rave joint for fifteen year olds popping placebos with trademarks stamped into the sides."  
  
"Well," Yuffie said slowly, "a simple 'because' would have sufficed."  
  
Reno had to laugh. It had been a long, long time since he had genuinely gone out with anyone at all. Bars had two purposes, getting trashed and getting laid, both of which Reno had gotten quite skilled at. Even when he had still been a Turk, small talk with Tseng had been reduced to mission briefing, with Rude it was non existent, and with Elena it was simply intolerable. Deciding that for a passing distraction, this was working out quite well, Reno decided to press the conversation.  
  
"So how did you end up in that place of yours, anyway?" he asked between gulps of skotch. "I mean, you are a genuine princess, right? Shouldn't you live in a place with spires, and servants, and working hot water?"  
  
Yuffie frowned. "I did that," she admitted, "for the first thirteen years of my life. There is a reason that Spike and his motley crew found my in the forests of an entirely different hemisphere, you know. I had to travel the world for five years just to get over the memories of my childhood, and you can imagine what that says considering I love this country. Now that I've finally mellowed out enough to get my own place, you'd better believe it isn't going to look anything like my old one."  
  
"Fair enough," Reno said, before taking another swallow. He put his glass down and eyed Yuffie's side of the table, which was slowly beginning to pile up with filled glasses. "You're falling behind."  
  
"I know," Yuffie admitted, "but I figure that once you pass out I can just pour these down a sink and pretend I drank them."  
  
"Don't get your hopes up," Reno smirked, "odds are I'll fall asleep from exhaustion before I succumb to this stuff."  
  
"I'd concede, but I don't want to give you the satisfaction," Yuffie said, then paused, apparently uncomfortable being the only one in the conversation giving information about themselves. "So how about you? I have a pretty morbid idea of how you've spent most your time since your childhood, but what have you been doing since you left the Turks? Can't be anything too entertaining, I would have heard you were in town by now."  
  
"You don't want to know." Reno said simply.  
  
"Why?" Yuffie asked, with considerable trepidation. "What have you been doing?"  
  
"You sure you want to know?" Reno asked with a wicked grin.  
  
"...if you don't tell me, I'll be forced to beat you to death with your own stool," Yuffie countered cheerily.  
  
Glancing back and forth around the bar, Reno smiled secretly. He leaned conspiratoriously across the table and cupped his hands around his mouth, apparently preparing to unleash a secret that would bring the very building crashing down around their heads if overhead. Eyes wide in anticipation, Yuffie leaned in closer to hear him as he breathed out his answer in a single word, alcohol tainted whisper.  
  
"Nothing."  
  
"Nothing?" Yuffie asked, positive she heard right but knowing it was possible Reno had simply lost track of his own train of thought, something that seemed to happen to him at least once a day.  
  
"Absolutely nothing," Reno said, leaning back in his chair and grinning.  
  
"So you've been unemployed for a year following a long and healthy career as a murderer," Yuffie acknowledged, slowly nodding her head. "You are a catch and a half, Turkey."  
  
"I knew you wouldn't get it," Reno said offhandedly, "but I think it was some of the most enjoyable twelve months I've ever been through. I don't have any money, so I really just go from place to place, picking up what I can when I can. The only thing I've really kept with me all this time is my EMR, and I'm not even sure why I've held onto that."  
  
"A memento, I guess," Yuffie said with a shrug, resigned to take another shot and winced as it went down. "But you couldn't have just done nothing. I see you sitting here, and even know you look like you want to jump up and sucker punch somebody. Even if you weren't working, you'd have to have a hobby, or a few friends, or a girl or something."  
  
"Does womanizing count as a hobby?" Reno asked.  
  
"...in prison, maybe," Yuffie said, rolling her eyes at him. "I guess that gives an obvious answer to that last part."  
  
"Common sense," Reno began, "gives an obvious answer to that last part. Besides the fact that I don't have a house, money, or any mode of transportation with which to drive them around in, I'm not looking for a steady women."  
  
"You're about to make a crack about bovine purchase and free milk, aren't you?" Yuffie asked.  
  
"Nah, fuck clichés," Reno said quickly, "the whole concept of being tied down to someone just scares the hell out of me. I did the whole co-dependency thing when I was living on the streets with my little sister, and it didn't exactly work out that well. There's nothing you could get from a relationship that you can't get from a series of rapid fire one night stands."  
  
Yuffie paused, looking over at him in disbelief. "Do you really believe that?"  
  
Reno smiled, showing far more teeth than he needed to. "No," he admitted, "but before most women can figure that out I'm not only out their door, I'm in somebody else's."  
  
"And you call me a maso," Yuffie snipped, took another shot, and that time she didn't wince. "You're not only going to end up alone, you're going to end up alone with herpes. A loner guy with a fear of commitment, what a surprise."  
  
"It's not so much a fear as an unconditional loathing," Reno said playfully, "Why? Do you mean to tell me that the sovereign Miss Kisaragi has a better half in waiting somewhere?" At his words, a visible shudder ran through his companion, even though there was no drink present anywhere near her.  
  
"Let's just say that's one area of Wutain culture I wish would just fade away and be lost forever," Yuffie responded, and when Reno gave her a questioning look she continued onward. "It's a tradition that in cases of clan leaders, like my father, that any children he has be married off to children of the leaders of the other clans. It's just a rotational system short of incest."  
  
Chuckling quietly, Reno gestured to the bar tender for another round, and turned back to see a thoroughly disgusted looking Yuffie. It was nice to see that she was logical enough to realize that some traditions were stupid, no matter how long they've been practiced. "It took me a long time to systematically alienate every potential suitor, let me tell you, and even after I did that dad wanted to fly people in from the other end of the country," she said.  
  
"So you aren't against the concept of commitment as a whole?" Reno questioned her, not entirely sure why he was even interested.  
  
"As long as the selection process has nothing to do with who your parents are," Yuffie answered, "I'm fine with it." She paused just long enough to reject the idea of downing another shot. "Not right this second, mind you, but eventually."  
  
"So you're a chance meeting kind of girl?" Reno asked, wondering if he had heard that line in some bad country song.  
  
"I went on a life threatening mission I barely understood because I bumped into a group of misfits in the middle of the woods and saw a slight opportunity to pick up some materia along the way," Yuffie said with a self mocking smile, "Let's just say I don't keep a day planner."  
  
"So you've gotta be surprised," Reno ventured idly, "I'll have to remember that."  
  
"Oh yeah?" Yuffie asked. "For what?"  
  
"Escaping, stealing your money," he smirked coolly, "anything else that occurs to me." He yawned once and glanced at his wrist, quickly realizing that the last time he had even owned a watch had been long over a year ago. He put his elbows down on the table and sunk his chin into his hands, determined to put his drinking on halt until Yuffie began to catch up or until the room stopped spinning.  
  
Neither seemed probably as Yuffie mimicked his actions, though with her shorts forearms she quickly found herself looking up at him. The smoke had begun to clear as the night ticked away and more and more people began to slink out the door, and she suddenly realized that they were almost alone in the place. "Anything else?" she asked softly.  
  
An interesting that about Reno is that he was pretty fond of himself as a whole, he absolutely abhorred his inner voice. So when it picked this moment to start speaking up and warning him about the impending trouble that would be caused by what he was about to attempt, it confirmed the action in the former Turks mind. He dropped his hands away and leaned further across the table, turning his face to the side and bringing his lips forward to meet hers while she watched him closely.   
  
A sudden flurry of activity at the door interrupted his move, the door flung open much harder than any man should be able to do at two o'clock in the morning. As the few remaining patrons of the bar looked on in surprise, three men in the law enforcement uniform of the city came marching in. Yuffie turned to face them with a blank expression, and when she turned back to say something to Reno he was already gone, the alcohol apparently not enough to dull his survival instinct- he had ducked down and under the table.  
  
It was just as well he did, as the leading man spotted her and pointed her out to the others. The remaining two talked amongst themselves, apparently disagreeing, but eventually one over ruled the other and sent him trudging over towards Yuffie. She rose to meet him, still holding her glass, waved off the salute of respect he gave her, and cut right to the chase. "What is it, Stephen?"  
  
"Well, ma'am, its about Gorki..." Reno heard him say from under the table, and closed his eyes. It didn't take a genius to figure out what was about to come. "There were reports of gunshots in the alley behind the Pagoda, and we found him when we went to investigate. He's... he's gone."  
  
Glass shattered as Yuffie's grip slipped, and as he scooted backwards across the floor to avoid the flying fragments Reno knew it was time he got to work. 


	6. Chapter Six: Foot Races and Revelations

"It seems like an odd set of targets to choose," Reno said thoughtfully, running both hands back through his dark red hair as he walked the streets of Wutai. The fact that normal people had all gone to sleep over four hours ago wasn't lost on him, and there was a certain listlessness to his movements, though his words were as clear as ever. "I mean, the Pagoda leaders are renowned for being skilled fighters, it's basically the entire point."  
  
Yuffie shot him a withering look, the confusion of the night past and the stress of the upcoming morning beginning to weigh on her. "You really have no idea, do you?" she asked, sounding meaner then she had intended, but not really caring- if anyone could take an angry comment in stride, it was the former hitman she was walking with.  
  
"Apparently not," Reno said after a pause, glancing off a ways down the street. In the distance, looking as small as a doll house, was the home of Yuffie Kisaragi. She had declined the invitation of a ride home from the police men, reasoning that it would be hard to sneak Reno into a transport and keep him hidden for the duration of the trip, and so the two had been faced with a walk home at four in the morning. "We still have a bit to go, care to explain it to me?"  
  
After a moments pause in which Yuffie looked Reno over, making sure he was serious in request, the thief took a deep breath and started in on a speech that she herself had been given time and time again by her father. "There are five branches of the Wutai army, even after the war with Shin-Ra which drastically reduced our numbers. Each of the branches is dedicated to a different type of fighting style... ranged, magical, hand to hand, melee, and summoning."  
  
She glanced at Reno to make sure he was following thus far, and he nodded, prompting her onward. "Anyway," she said, "each division has an absolute general, picked for different reasons... mastery, loyalty, leadership... and they are given complete control of their branch. This saves us from the problems presented by a single leader because we can lose one, two, or even three and still have a respectable force mobile. After all, it's rare you commit your entire army to a battle, anyway."  
  
"Sounds smart," Reno said, nodding, and even in the darkness he could see Yuffie crack a smile at the compliment to her homeland, and decided with a shrug to lower the edges a bit. "Though it isn't exactly working, is it? I guess the plan was devised with opponents as honorable as Wutai in mind, but with assassins involved it isn't much harder to take out five men then it is to take out one."  
  
"I just don't understand it," Yuffie said sadly, "we aren't at war with anyone! Even if somebody was harboring plans to come after us in the upcoming year, this would be pointless. Another benefit of having that many leaders working together is all they need to do is get together and vote on who will be the next member of their rank, there isn't any long or involved process involved. Gorki and Shake will be replaced within weeks, as disgusting as that sounds."  
  
"Maybe that's the point," Reno said under his breath, but Yuffie heard him mumble and raised a questioning eyebrow, so he repeated himself. "I mean," he added, "ambition is the root of all things, and gil be damned- that includes evil. Do you think somebody might be trying to get themselves on the fast track by knocking out their superiors?"  
  
"You did hear me say the word 'loyalty' in the list of Pagoda qualifications, right?" Yuffie said acidly, and Reno couldn't help but roll his eyes. Patriotism was one thing, but dealing with Yuffie's zealot like devotion could be overbearing.   
  
"People can fool you," Reno replied, and when he saw Yuffie's skeptical look ventured onward, "and yes, they can even fool the almighty Pagoda leaders."  
  
"Do you think it's over, then?" Yuffie asked hopefully. "I mean, two open floors is the most that have existed since the war. Odds are, if someone is trying to get into a leadership position they were next in line anyway."  
  
"I don't know," Reno said slowly, rubbing the stubble on his chin thoughtfully. "People who are just about to step up to bat can usually exercise a lot more patience than someone three or four places back in the line up. Still, I guess it would be, now that they've showed a pattern the cops are going to have bodyguards all over the other floor leaders."  
  
Since he was currently staring with strange interest at a for sale notice in the window of a house down the street from Yuffie's, it took Reno a bit to notice that his companion had stopped walking. He turned around in surprise to see her standing quite still, her jaw slightly lowered, and even without much light he could tell she was paler than usual. "What?" he asked, "What is it?"  
  
"They don't know," she said breathlessly.  
  
"Who doesn't know *what*?" Reno demanded.  
  
"They don't know!" she repeated, practically screaming. "The police! They don't know that Gorki and Shake were Pagoda leaders! It's kept secret for protection, only those who climb the Pagoda all the way to the top know who they all are, and even then they aren't told if a change occurs afterwards! We have to go and make sure everyone is OK!"  
  
She turned on her heel and started sprinting down the street with speed that was surprising even for her small frame. Groaning inwardly, Reno followed after her, only his longer legs allowing him to eventually catch up with her. He didn't slow up, her urgency contagious, but still he questioned the action as they went. "Won't Godo tell them?" he gasped out.  
  
"No!" Yuffie replied frantically. "He isn't allowed to... it's an old tradition, the leader of the top floor of the Pagoda set it in place the first time he chose four fighters to serve under him. He had to swear never to reveal the identities to anyone... my old man doesn't follow too many of the old ways, but the ones he does pay attention to he is devout."  
  
"Fuck," Reno breathed out as he ran, but then inspiration struck him. "Wait! What about the other floor leaders?"  
  
"I'm not betting their lives that they've been told!" Yuffie cried in response. "They came to me because I'm the daughter of Godo, and after we found Shake and I saw that Turk card I put in an order that they alert me whenever a murder happens!"  
  
A name suddenly struck Reno as he ran, though where it came from he had no idea. He must have heard it sometime in Yuffie's mumbling, or maybe a local had let it slip in a bar. Either way, however, he suddenly knew a name that could very well belong to the man they were going to go help. "Are we going to see Staniv?" he asked out, having to half yell as Yuffie was starting to gain on him again. That slowed her down a bit as she shot him a stunned look for coming up with the word.  
  
"N-no," she said between tired breaths, her feet smacking the pavement, "he stepped down six months ago, he was getting pretty old. Were going to Chekov's house!"  
  
With considerable effort, Reno managed to catch her again, those his lungs felt ready to pop like over filled balloons. "Wait a minute," he choked, cut off by a stream of pained coughing, "at least... at least this means it couldn't have been the Turks!"  
  
"Why?" came the quick reply.  
  
Jesus Christ, how much further is this place? Reno groaned inside, but outwardly he simply said, "This has to be someone who has climbed the Pagoda, or they wouldn't know who to kill!"   
  
Even as he spoke Reno suddenly caught the error in his words, but couldn't amend them before Yuffie vocally pointed it out. "I never said they were doing this for fun!" she cried, "As long as the person who hired them knows, he can just pass the information along!"  
  
'How did you miss that?' Reno scolded himself, and realized that even though the pain in his side was only growing he and Yuffie had slowed down to a job, neither of them built for long sprints. 'You've been out of the business too long... or too much oxygen is going to your legs and not your brain right now.'  
  
"Besides," Yuffie said suddenly, and Reno was surprised at the bitterness in her voice. "They wouldn't be excused even if that wasn't so, and you know it!"  
  
"What are you talking about?" Reno asked, genuinely bewildered.  
  
"Tseng climbed the Pagoda before he went to work for Shin-Ra!" she informed him, "He was one of the youngest to ever even try it! Everyone thought he was going to be the next floor leader, but after he beat my father he simply packed up and left! That's how you knew about Staniv, isn't it? Tseng met up with him when he tried to climb it! He was still pretty young back then!"  
  
With a sinking feeling, Reno realized she was right. Though it hadn't occurred to him at the time, her words prompted a flash of memory, Tseng talking about a scar he had on his left arm. He'd showed them the slashing motion that had caused it, had said something about Staniv, a Pagoda fighter doing it, and then told them the correct way to counter it. Not only did the secrecy of the leader's identities not pardon the Turks from the crime, but it made them more likely than ever, and Reno began to wonder if he had managed to negotiate himself into a life sentence by offering to find the killer.  
  
"So who took Staniv's place?" he asked, but no response came as Yuffie suddenly stopped in her tracks, turned, and began to race up the lawn of a particularly large home. They had arrived at last, and with a surprisingly large amount of trepidation Reno realized that Yuffie planned to simply barge inside. He chased after her and managed to stop her just before she threw the door open, grabbing her arms and pulling her back. She shot him an angry look, and with wheezing lungs he explained.  
  
"You can't just run in!" he whispered harshly, "You don't know who's in there! Put your ear to the door and listen!"  
  
She didn't, so with an angry sigh he did, and after a moment she joined him. They waited for thirty seconds with nothing but silence, and after Yuffie jabbed him with her elbow Reno nodded, confirming that at the very least they weren't going to run into anyone as soon as they entered the house. She gave him a look as if that had been obvious the whole time, and the two pulled their heads away from the door.  
  
*BAM!*  
  
Instinct and training kicked in together, and Reno dived to the ground, catching Yuffie around the waist and dragging her with him. For a brief moment, he thought he had just been startled by thunder, because almost as if it was on cue the skies opened up and it began to rain, thick sticky drops that cascaded around the two. The ring in his ears, however, was unmistakable- someone had fired a pistol in the house.  
  
"Get off me!"  
  
Yuffie pushed him away and rolled to her feet, throwing the door open and running inside the house. Reno went to follow her, but a sudden streak to his left caught his attention, a lone figure racing through the night and the rain away from the house. He briefly considered yelling into the house to tell Yuffie, but she was already too far inside, and so he took off after the man himself, his joints already aching from that last sprint.  
  
Whoever it was, they were fast, even while weighed down by the massive handgun with was evident in his fist. The rain picked up as Reno chased him between two houses, a passageway which turned into an alley, and for a brief moment the former Turk was blinded as lightning flashed. Those few seconds were all it took for the fleeing man to get out of sight, and Reno cursed, finding himself faced with two possible passages of escape. Growling in frustration, he chose the left path, powering down in with all the strength he had left.   
  
The path lead onto one of Wutai's frequent bridges, a long wooden plank construct that seemed to stretch on forever, Reno reached into his jacket and produced his EMR, cursing the rain that made it a suicide weapon, but still feeling better knowing it was in his hands. It didn't matter how fast the killer was running, there was no way he had gotten all the way over this bridge already, and so Reno pointed his weapon blindly out in front of him, waiting for another flash of lightning to illuminate the world.  
  
*Flash!*  
  
Nothing! Cursing audibly, Reno turned to his right, and realized with a start that the path he had not chosen let out down in the grass that lay below the bridge. His world went dark again, and he waited with painful impatience for a second bolt of lightning to show him the man he had been chasing, to possibly reveal his identity.  
  
*Flash!*  
  
There he was! A lone figure, racing across the ground, the rain pelting against him. In the brief second he had, Reno saw that the man had actually fallen behind, probably having paused to dispose of the no longer visible gun. He also saw that the man was broad shouldered, his skin dark, his eyes hidden by a pair of black sunglasses. He saw a face that he would never forget, a face he had worked beside every day for ten years.  
  
In the second that he saw anything at all, he saw Rude Gracin, his dark blue suit soaked with rain.  
  
***  
  
Yuffie had been waiting for him when he got back, her blood soaked hands and devastated expression telling Reno everything he needed to know about the result of the murder attempt. She seemed mad that he had disappeared, but lacked the ability to vocalize it, all the usual manic energy that made up more than half of her personality drained clean away. "Where the hell did you go?" she managed.  
  
"Saw the guy running away," Reno replied slowly, still winded from his chase even after the walk back. "Chased him."  
  
"Oh yeah?" Yuffie said, hope suddenly striking her features. "Did you catch him?"  
  
"...sorry," he said simply, kneeling down in the grass and taking deep breaths as her face fell once again.  
  
"Did you see who it was?" she asked, trying to mask her disappointment in his failed pursuit. Reno glanced up, watching her for what seemed like an eternity, before answering.  
  
"No," he said slowly, "No, I didn't."  
  
"Oh," she choked out, and turned away, her shoulders beginning to shake. Reno winced as he walked up and put an arm around her, surprised that she didn't pull away from his touch.  
  
"Listen..." he said, then paused, before resuming. "Listen... should we get going to look over Godo? I can't imagine he'd be exempt from this."  
  
"No," Yuffie said, turning to face him, putting on a brave face if the moisture on her cheeks was only rain. "He always has security, and even if he didn't I don't even think an assassin could knock him off. He's a tough old guy."  
  
"OK..." he said, before a sudden thought struck him. "What about the fourth floor leader? Who replaced Staniv?"  
  
A desolate look on her face, Yuffie met his eyes with her own.  
  
"Well," she said, "...I did." 


	7. Chapter Seven: Of Lords and Loving

"I want them *found*!" the voice roared, and was punctuated by the single echoing boom of a meaty fist brought crashing down upon the bare wood of a table with enough force to send cracks running across it's surface in every direction. Servants scattered in away from the source of the violence, knowing better than to approach their master when he was in this condition. They pitied the lone messenger who was forced to stand in the room with the man and who had brought the news that angered their lord so, but none of them quite enough so that they would lend a hand to the unfortunate soul.  
  
The greeting room was usually a condensation point of merriment and nostalgia, of piping hot tea and ice cold sherberts. It was now reduced to a veritable compost pit of broken furniture and shattered porcelain, as the muscle packed but aged master of the house stormed around, upsetting anything that stood in his path. A serving cup, gifted from the greatest craftsman of Wutai's current age, formed of perfect crystal and gleaming jewels, was hurled into the wall like a common mug and nearly disintegrated upon contact, raining down as diamond dust onto the thick carpeting of the floor.   
  
Yes, it was safe to say that Lord Godo was angry.  
  
"I-I'm sorry, m'lord!" came the terrified reply, near tears, as the shaking slip of a man it issued forth from stumbled backwards to safer grounds. The messenger's name was Lucia, and though he had not asked for the job even he could not deny that it was a lucrative one, with high pay and very low actual risk, considering it was counted as a position in the army of Wutai. However, the temper of the Lord of the country seemed to have thrown the safety benefit out the window, all because- through no fault of his own- Lucia had been the one to tell him that no known assassins could be located within the country's borders.  
  
"Do you not understand," Godo demanded, his chest heaving, his eyes wide with frustration and rage, "how important this is? Yuffie is not only my daughter and only living relative, she is the future of the nation we have dedicated our lives too! These... snakes... these animals... they are a threat to her life. I want them brought to justice, and I want it done *now*."  
  
"S-sir," Lucia stumbled, struggling to keep his voice from breaking in panic, "is it true what the rumors are saying? That one of the men killed was a... a lord of the Pagoda?"  
  
For a long moment, Godo simply held the messenger in his gaze, thinking over the question he had asked and wondering if it even deserved an answer. Finally, with a deep sigh that seemed to expel all the air in his mighty frame, the lord of Wutai sank into one of the few remaining chairs in the room, and gestured for Lucia to do the same. After the man had nervously did so, Godo nodded, just once, to affirm his words.  
  
"But, sir!" Lucia nearly exploded, and then checked himself. "B-begging your pardon, sir, but how is that possible? A simple assassin, taking down a warrior of the pagoda? How is that possible?"  
  
Godo glanced over at him, gazing between his thick fingers, his face pressed down into his hands. A messenger to the lord for many years, Lucia had always seen the man as a model of dignity and poise, never before seeing him so angry or so down trodden. "If you knew the answer to that question," Godo told him in a gravely voice still tainted with rage, "you would know the reason that, in the end, we lost the war."  
  
"I'm sorry sir," Lucia said slowly, sadly, "but I don't understand."  
  
"Technology over magic," Godo said simply, staring piercingly at nothing at all. "The new ways over the old ways. Steel... over soul. These assassins, they blend our world with the world of Midgar, but in the end they are more like a soldier than they ever could be a ninja. They have our stealth, and our agility... and their guns. A sword stroke will always land later than a bullet. And *that*... my young friend... is why we must find these people, and destroy them. Because they are very capable of destroying us."  
  
Feeling suddenly very weak in his chair, Lucia stared across the room at his lord, at a loss for words. Godo, however, had enough left in him to close off their conversation.  
  
"Take the order," he said slowly, resolutely, "to the middle of the town. Make it public. This will not be exclusive to police, or leaders, or even citizens. Issue a warrant on every man or woman who has ever been even rumored to have ties with an assassin group. I want them brought to me." Godo took a deep, weary, breath.  
  
*"Now."*  
  
***  
  
She was lying on the only couch in her entire house when he found her, her legs kicked up and her arms folded neatly behind her head. Despite the relaxed post, her face told anything but a story of ease, her eyes wide and thoughtful, and appearing like they were about to start flowing freely with tears. But Yuffie Kisaragi was a warrior at heart, and always would be. She didn't cry where others could see her.  
  
And Reno, standing in the doorway of the room, leaning against the frame with his head pressed idly to the structure, had a pretty good view of things. He wasn't sure if Yuffie could see him, but for some reason he didn't feel the need to announce his presence on the off chance that she could not. For the moment, anyway, he was fully content to stand there watching her watch nothing at all, the graceful curves of the sulking princess a welcome break from trying to track down his former co-workers.  
  
"Did you know my father wanted me to move back into his house?"  
  
So apparently she *could* see him. Fair enough. With a shrug, Reno slid from the doorway and strode easily over to the couch, hooking his legs over the opposite arm from Yuffie and sitting back on it. "I guess that's a big no-no," he responded, remembering her former rant against the her childhood home.  
  
"You guess correctly," she said in an oddly detached voice, "your prize is the bullet I would have had to use on myself if I'd actually agreed."  
  
"So your old man thinks you might be a target, too?" Reno asked, finding himself strangely attentive as Yuffie uncrossed her legs, and then crossed them again the other way.  
  
"It isn't exactly rocket science," she said, "even an eight year old can work out the process of elimination. He's too well protected to even be touched, so I'm the only one who's left."  
  
"Well," Reno mused, "if someone makes a move against you, that will at least clear the names of the three new guys you and your dad elect to fill out the Pagoda."  
  
"Actually," Yuffie replied, "no. We aren't replacing Shake, Gorki, or Chekov until we get this figured out. Godo can't stand the thought of putting a murderer in charge of one of the floors, and neither can I."  
  
"Noble," Reno reasoned, "but not that bright. I mean, if we're right about this whole forced ascension deal, your leaving yourself open as a target."  
  
Yuffie didn't rise to the bait, and it was only then that Reno realized how heavily this whole deal was lying upon her, if she was down enough not to snap back after a crack at her homeland. He dropped down off the arm of the sofa onto the cushions, watching appreciatively as she bounced with the impact. Appreciation or not, however, his temporarily homeless hand ended up on the relatively safe location of her lower leg, and he gave it a reassuring squeeze.  
  
"What'd you tell him?" he asked, "You didn't need the help of his fancy protection, because of the ruggedly good looking fugitive you have taking care of things back at your place?"  
  
"I'm sure that would go over well," Yuffie said with a small laugh, which wasn't much but it was something. "Especially because he would have you hauled off to jail before I finished the sentence, even though there was no Turk card left at Chekov's place. I guess we got there before they could leave one."  
  
"What *did* you tell him?" Reno asked, slowly walking his fingers up to his companions knee.  
  
"That I was hunting," Yuffie replied simply. "I think he respected that."  
  
"And here I thought I was the one doing that," Reno remarked.  
  
"You thought wrong," Yuffie said, her voice breaking strangely, and suddenly there was a hand on his collar and lips pressed to his. He didn't delude himself for a second as the thief pushed him backwards with a vicious kiss and slid her legs around so she was straddling him, he knew he was nothing more than a temporary distraction from her pain. He distracted real well, though, and he intended to prove it as he wrapped his arms around her shoulders and pulled her down to him.  
  
It's just one more notch, he found himself saying in his mind as she slid his shirt up and over his pale shoulders, tossing it down to the floor to land on the spot that hers already lie, on a non-existent belt. When the remainder of their apparel joined it, he found himself repeating that phrase over and over again, even when he found himself actually kissing her neck as opposed to pulling her hair, even when he realized it was fingers pressed against his back and not nails.  
  
He repeated it when he grabbed her by the waist and spun her around, pinning her beneath him to absolutely no protest, and she buried her face in the crook of his neck. He repeated it when she finally let the tears flow, streaming silently down her cheeks and dropping onto his chest, letting her other urges make the noises in its place. He repeated it when he actually slowed to match her movements, when the act became a callaboration and not a race.  
  
Just one more notch, just one more notch, just one more notch...  
  
So why, when she leaned back to cry aloud her approval, couldn't he bring himself to look her in her watery eyes?  
  
A/N: Real quick one. This segment is short because I feel it has more impact that way, though Lord knows this isn't an area I'm proficient in writing. Review, and let me know one way or another what you think about how it went. 


	8. Chatever Eight: Missing Pieces

A sudden chill snapped Yuffie back to the world of the waken, her bare skin suddenly lining with goose bumps courtesy of some unknown sensation. Unwilling to open her long closed eyes and do battle with the standing forces of sunlight, Yuffie struggled to sink deeper into her couch, sliding her legs beneath the nearest cushion. Still not warmed, she rolled over, searching for warming body heat but finding it not. Frowning now, she reached around, searching for coarse hair to play with or thin layers of chin stubble to scrape against, but found neither. She was alone on the couch.  
  
And, with that realization, she opened her eyes.  
  
There was no one around, no dark black clothes strewn on the floor, no half empty bottle of booze or stubbed out cigarette. How Reno had managed to get off the couch without her even noticing she would never know, but somehow the how seemed a lot less important than the why at this point. Her clothes had been stacked up at the bottom of the couch, not exactly folded, but at least in a more presentable state than they had been when hanging from the various other pieces of furniture in the room. Probably an old trick he used, a way to get the random bar maid out of his apartment faster. Of course, this time he was at the girls place, and he was the one leaving.  
  
Yuffie sighed, disgust tainting her voice. It wasn't like her to be that stupid, both in the act and in the person it had been with. The fact that the former Turk seemed to sweat aphrodisiac was no excuse, and was in fact was just a further testament to the depth of her mistake. She would have to go the doctor's now, and it would get back to her father... terrific. As much as she loved her homeland, there were definitely times Yuffie Kisaragi wished she could be just another citizen of Wutai.  
  
She couldn't imagine she'd be seeing him around. He had got what he'd wanted, probably what he'd been sticking around all this time to begin with. She genuinely believed that he had nothing to do with the assassinations of the Pagoda leaders, but the fact he had used it as an excuse to leer around her home made her sick.  
  
And what else?  
  
There was nothing else, was there? She was upset at him, furious, and furious at herself. She had every right to be, though maybe she deserved more of her own contempt than she did. After all, this was what Reno did, and she had been able to guess that easily enough on their first meeting. What made her thing that she would be any different? Anything special? She had made an incredibly stupid mistake.  
  
And what else?  
  
And... and... she was scared, too. She had been scared since this started, since she found Shake's body laying sprawled on the floor of his apartment, since she had found a bloodstained piece of paper pegged to his door. Even more scared when they found Gorki, and she realized what was happening, the link between the killings quite plain. She had known that she might be a target, that all logical reason said she could be the next one attacked. But somehow, it hadn't hit her so hard, not when he was still around, with his cocky grin and his EMR. Not because he had been a Turk, but because he was Reno, and seemed genuinely concerned in keeping her alive, in helping her out.  
  
"You son of a bitch...."  
  
Swallowing hard, Yuffie rolled off the couch, and began to get dressed.  
  
***  
  
The saloon style doors that led into the bar swung inwards with a rusty squeak, drawing the look of the few individuals inside who had decided the best way to get rid of their hangovers was by starting work on the next one. Reno paid their bloodshot gazes and chapped lipped smiles no heed as he entered, faced with a sudden onslaught of random designer scents and pop music.   
  
If Hell had a happy hour, Reno reasoned, this would be it. He didn't understand this place, had never pretended to, and he certainly hadn't understood Rude's insistence on stopping by whenever the two had found themselves in the area. His bald former colleague had seemed to hate this place as much as he, the sizable vein located over his left eyebrow always setting to throbbing when they entered, but for some reason he came back time and time again, self loathing coming to the surface in its most passive aggressive form.  
  
Somehow, when Yuffie had asked why Reno took her across town and instead of to this place, the red haired man hadn't thought that the true answer would have been the one she wanted to hear.  
  
Rude wasn't here yet, and since he knew his old friend as someone who never missed a deadline by accident, Reno took the proper message from that fact. He decided he might as well make the best of his waiting time and sidled over to the counter, finding himself faced with a pink haired bar tender who didn't look old enough to be drinking alcohol, yet alone serving it.  
  
"What can I get ya?" her voice asked, peppy in a way no one outside of grade school should be able to manage.  
  
"Chocolate milk," Reno said with a straight face, but when that drew only a puzzled look from the server he sighed and took a seat, slowly rubbing his eyes. The fact that he had left a perfectly proportioned and undeniably nude vixen to come here made him twitch, but somehow he doubted he would have been the first thing she wanted to see upon waking up, anyway. The girl had enough troubles in her life. "Uh, is it noon yet?"  
  
"About half past," the girl answered without checking her watch. Reno shrugged.  
  
"OK then, anything's game," Reno replied thoughtfully, "let's start off with just a Corona though. I feel like working my way up the ranks today." The bubbly tender nodded and scurried into the back to fetch his drink, and Reno had to admit that if nothing else this place did offer some entertaining visuals. He was unable to follow it, however, as a heavy hand fell on his shoulder, the owner having come upon him so quietly it could only have been one person.  
  
"Reno," Rude said simply, with a nod of his head, and took a seat beside him. "You wanted to talk with me?"  
  
Reno opened his mouth to answer, but his drink order came and he decided to wait until the girl had wandered off to help someone else before continuing. He lost the opportunity, however, as Rude gestured lightly towards the pink haired tender, a strange look on his face. "So you've met Bubbles," he said simply.  
  
"Bubbles?" Reno asked with distaste. "That seems fitting. Is *she* why you always wade your way through this place? What is she, your kid?"  
  
"Reno..." Rude sighed, running his hand back over the bare surface of his head.  
  
Squinting at his old friend, Reno mocked surprise. "What? She is? Does she-"  
  
"She's twenty two," Rude cut him off in mid sentence, "and although I appreciate the confidence you seem to have in me, I was not sleeping around before I turned ten."  
  
"Fair enough," Reno agreed quickly. One thing, at least, had not changed since he had left the Turks, Rude was still absolutely no fun to try to banter with. Once Reno had tried a knock knock joke on the guy, and he'd almost gotten his lights punched out for it. "I have some questions I need you to answer."  
  
"I don't think I can help you," Rude said simply, to Reno's surprise.  
  
"What?" he asked. "Why? You don't even know what I'm going to ask yet!"  
  
"Does it matter?" Rude asked.  
  
"...I don't see how it wouldn't," Reno said, shooting Rude a confused look. Even he was never quite *this* blunt, and something was clearly irritating the bald man, "unless you've just automatically assumed I plan to ask for last years business report or something."  
  
"Since when have you cared about that?" Rude asked, and Reno was back to square one.  
  
"Well how about this..." he said slowly, "I ask a question, and if you don't like it, you don't answer it. You know. Conversation."  
  
The corners of Rude's mouth dipped downward, and even though he was still wearing his ever present sunglasses Reno could tell the man was glaring at him. "You just don't get it, do you Reno?" he demanded, and there was that vein again, but apparently not caused by the bar itself this time.  
  
"I guess not," Reno admitted, taking a drink and trying to give out the impression of indifference to Rude's apparent anger. "Care to explain!"  
  
"No!" Rude suddenly snapped, drawing a few curious gazes from around the bar. "That's just it, it couldn't matter less if I care to explain it. *I can't tell you things*. Personal preference has nothing to do with this, it's just the way things are."  
  
"Why?" Reno demanded. "Did Tseng order you not to?"  
  
"He didn't have to," Rude replied, "it's an implied rule. It always has been, or have you forgotten that already? It doesn't matter what the question is, we don't pass information to outsiders."  
  
Reno froze, the word burning in his ears. It was a label that had followed him almost all his life, and having it slapped on him by one of the people with whom he'd felt it didn't apply felt like a punch to the stomach. "Outsider?" he repeated it quietly, feeling it sting his throat. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"  
  
"Are you a Turk?" Rude asked with infuriating simplicity.  
  
"Rude-" Reno began, but was cut off once again.  
  
"Are... you.. a Turk?" Rude seemed to be speaking through gritted teeth, his hands sprawled out on the table trying to give out an illusion of serenity that was shattered by the way his nails dug into the wood. Reno stared at him a long time before answering his question.  
  
"No," he said after the time had passed, his gaze falling to his beer. "I guess I'm not."  
  
"There you go," Rude said, and to Reno's eternal aggravation began to rise, stopped only by a quick hand from his former colleague. For a brief moment, it looked like Rude was simply going to smack it away, but with a heavy sigh he allowed himself to be gently steered back into his seat, though his guarded demeanor didn't lesson at all. They sat in silence for a bit, Reno drawing occasionally from his drink.  
  
"What are you guys doing in Wutai?" Reno asked, finally.  
  
"I can't answer that," Rude replied quickly, firmly.  
  
"Oh come on!" Reno protested angrily, but Rude seemed just as angry as he.  
  
"We're doing this your way!" he growled, "You ask the question, and I tell you if I can answer it or not. You ask something about our current course of action and no, I can't tell you. Sorry. Anything else?"  
  
"Are the Turks behind the recent assassinations from the past week?"  
  
"I can't answer that."  
  
"Has Tseng mentioned anything about how it's Pagoda leaders being killed?"  
  
"I can't answer that."  
  
"What are you doing in Wutai!?"  
  
*"I said I can't answer that!"*  
  
Somehow, both men were now on their feet, Reno snapping out the questions and Rude snapping out his denials. Every eye in the house was on the pair now, and even Bubbles seemed to lose the majority of her pep in the face of the impending trouble. She slipped quickly into the back, in search of the bar's owner, while the two continued their spectacle. "I need to know about this!" Reno cried.  
  
"Why?" Rude demanded, "What the fuck is so important about it? Why do you care so much?"  
  
"No," Reno hissed, "this isn't about me. See... that, *I'm* not telling *you*. It should be enough for you to know that I need this information, that it's important to me."  
  
"Well it isn't," came the heated response, and as Reno looked away in frustration Rude made his move for the door. This time there was no gentle hand on his shoulder to stop him, as Reno simply stuck out his entire arm and caught the man around the chest, pushing him forward and sending him bumping into the bar, eliciting gasps from the enthralled on lookers. Rude seemed stunned more than angered by the action, but as he saw the dangerous look in Reno's eyes his own narrowed in threat.  
  
"You don't want to do this," he instructed Reno, taking a deep breath and swelling up like a balloon, expanding his massive frame to its full extent. It was an animal trick, but it works just as well for people, and the bald man made an impressive sight as he stared down his former colleague.  
  
"Why not?" Reno asked, almost mockingly. "Because you'll dry up on me? Because you'll stop telling me all this great information? I don't think you understand me when I say that I need to get to the bottom of this, and I'm going to. I might not hear what I need to from you, but I'm going to do everything I can so I do."  
  
"Fine," Rude said, nodding slowly. "Fine, if that's how you want to do things." With a shrug of his shoulders he slid off his navy blue jacket and laid it across the counter, revealing an undershirt stretched to its limits by the muscle underneath. A single tattoo marked the dark skin of the man's left arm, a coil of barbed wire that, unlike the standard issue, appeared to be puncturing into the skin, with little ink wells of blood at the point of every tip. "Are you going to hit me?" Rude demanded. "Then do it."  
  
Reno couldn't believe it had come to this. He wasn't entirely sure what to expect when he had called Halo that morning and told him to set this meeting up, but it certainly wasn't this. Through all the disagreements, arguments, and flat out fights he and Rude had gone through since they'd met, they had always been fueled by anger, not this cold seething feeling in the bottom of his gut. Still. Reno was not the sort of man could ignore a direction like the one he'd just been given.   
  
He leaned back as if to stretch, letting his furthest hand pat the table behind him experimentally. He felt cool glass on his palm and wrapped his fist around the bottle, and instead of protesting the current resident of the table and owner of the drink scooted hastily backwards to escape the imminent scuffle. Rude cocked his head a little to one side, questioning, almost daring Reno to take the swing. What the fuck, Reno thought, and the muscles in his arm tensed...  
  
"Hey!"  
  
Both Turks, one current and one former, turned to face the source of the noise, a meaty looking and heavily scarred man who was wearing what might, a few hundred spills ago, been a business suit. His name was Little Joe, a moniker which could not be more misleading if it said something about him being a female monkey. He was the owner of the bar, and was in fact so wide that it took Reno a few seconds to notice the thin form of Bubbles practically cowering being his bulk.  
  
Little Joe cleared the distance between him and the two potential fighters in roughly three steps, positioning himself right between the two with a tempestuous look in his beady eyes. It didn't take long under that fixed stare for Reno to return the bottle to its proper place on the table, and for Rude to hastily snatch his jacket from the counter and wrap it once again around his shoulders. Once they had fully returned to their pre-aggression forms- and Joe had let a few awkward seconds pass for good measure- the owner of the bar gave a single, satisfied nod.  
  
"That's what I thought," he rumbled, pointing towards the exit with a finger as thick as a sausage. "I trust you gentleman know where the exit is."  
  
Briefly, Reno waged the satisfaction of frying the man like so much ham with his EMR against the possible reciprocations, but found in the end that the urge simply wasn't there. He hadn't actually wanted to fight Rude, both past incidents and the ripped form of his old friend attesting that it probably would have been an exchange he ended up on the losing side of. With an irritated growl, he turned on his heel and made his way out into the fresh air of the Wutai streets, well aware of Rude following close behind.  
  
The two paused briefly on the streets, staring around at nothing at all, and then turn and begin to make their way in opposite directions. Reno, however, isn't ready to let the conversation die completely, and yells one final question at Rude. "Hey!" he began, getting the Turks attention. "You used to tell me everything, man, even when Tseng told you not to... what the fuck changed?"  
  
Rude's sunglasses blocked his eyes, but Reno knew he was being stared intently at. Slowly, Rude licked his lips, thinking over the question, and then gave a simple shrug. "You have," he said, and was off again before Reno could even think of asking what the hell he had meant. 


	9. Chapter Nine: The Big Cliff Hanger

Needless to say, Reno was not in the best of moods after his confrontation with the man he'd once considered his best friend. A trip back to Yuffie's with no new information and no explanation of who he had met that wouldn't prosecute the Turks felt like a death march, so instead he simply wandered around the city with his hands in his pockets and his head down. The last thing he needed, he thought idly, was to get picked up and drug to Godo as a potential assassin of the Pagoda leaders. That would probably end up as the world's shortest trial, lasting just long enough for the sword stroke to fall across the back of his neck.  
  
After the debacle a little over a week ago, he was too recognizable in the market place, so he decided to go to the part of the town that he was used to staying when he had come to Wutai as part of business- the closest thing the city had to slums. Not that they were particularly run down... certainly not to the extent the lower levels of Midgar were, the presumptuous lords of the country would never allow such a blemish on their lands. Still, actions speak louder than words, or looks at it may be, and when you could buy a cheap, cracked piece of materia from a trench coat wearing man in the middle of a street that required the upmost concentration just to light a candle... well, the word 'slums' just popped into mind.  
  
It wasn't exactly that he felt at home in this sort of place, he simply felt the least exiled... in a land where anything goes, certainly a red haired former assassin who carries a lightning generator under his jacket would be accepted. It was a nice thought, but it wasn't so. In the land of the dried out husks of humanity, the slightest flame was feared, and Reno's eyes blazed whether he bid them to or not. Depressingly, even among the criminals he stuck out like a sore thumb.   
  
After the third gathering of self proclaimed thugs had shuffled across the streets to avoid contact with him as he walked down the roads, he'd stopped looking up ahead, assuming that the way would be cleared for him. So it was that when Yuffie Kisaragi rounded a corner, glancing suspiciously over a corner, the two almost collided with enough force to down them both, an event stopped only by a sudden gleam of sun off earring that caught Reno's eye.  
  
"Yuffie?" he asked in surprise, drawing her attention and shocking her a good deal more than he himself had been to see her here. For a brief moment, he thought her jaw was actually going to drop, but she quickly regained her exposure and set her feet and her chin. "What are you doing here?"  
  
"I," she said with a flourish, as if reveling in the way she set herself alone in the sentence, "am trying to find some information out on who the assassin may be."  
  
"Really?" Reno raised a single eyebrow in surprise, glancing around the street almost as if worried that someone had overheard her bold statement. "And here I thought that was my job."  
  
"Yeah?" Yuffie said instantly, taking on the direct air of a predator who had just found the opening it was seeking, "so did I." Before Reno could even attempt to comprehend the bizarre turn their conversation had just taken, Yuffie turned a cold shoulder to him and began to stalk down the street, heading deeper into the unsavory territory of Wutai's makeshift slums.   
  
Needless to say, he charged after her, inwardly wondering if this was 'make random, pissy comments to Reno' day. If he had needed something to remind him of why he hadn't gone into a charity business, this day had come through in spades, reminding him quite plainly that you take more shit when trying to help people out than when you have them locked in the center of your crosshairs. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" he demanded, not caring that a few snickers came from across the street as he was seen following Yuffie like an angry father. Not caring *much*, anyway.  
  
"It means," she growled at him, not lessening her pace or even looking at him, "that between sneaking out of bed like I'm some last call reject, and clearing your stuff from my house, I didn't assume you had much time for investigation."  
  
"Clearing my stuff from your house?" Reno mimicked in disbelief, "everything I own in the world, I'm fucking wearing. Did I own a bookcase or something that mysteriously disappeared? It's windy, so I brought my coat, and I brought my EMR because I'm a guy and it's shaped like a dick. Oh, and of course there's the fact *why does it even matter*?"  
  
Shaking her head in disgust, Yuffie sped up, but Reno matched her stride easily. This was no race through the night to an endangered mans home, and the former Turk was as angry as she now. "It doesn't," she spat at him, "it doesn't matter. At all. I just can't believe you had the gall to pretend you were trying to play the good guy for once."  
  
Reno's mind reeled. This was what had kept him awake all night, running his fingers through raven colored hair while mentally berating himself? This was what had almost driven him to smash a funnel of green glass over the bare skull over a man who had saved his life over a half dozen times, and vice versa? He was an idiot for even assuming this might work. "Pretend?" he snapped, "Pretend? Do you have any idea where I was today?"  
  
"No," she responded truthfully, "but I know where you weren't. And that's all that matters to me."  
  
And with a sudden sinking feeling, like a stab to the ribs, Reno knew he was sunk. He had opened the door and she walked right through it, there was nothing he could say back to a line like that which didn't make him look like... what? Himself? What the fuck was wrong with him? His feet caught on the side walk, and instead of stumbling forward he simply stopped, staring in disbelief as Yuffie continued to march resolutely forward, slowly disappearing from sight. Snarling in frustration, Reno spun around, and found the softest nearest thing to him- which happened to be a rusted old mail box.  
  
With a growl that was almost primal, he slammed his fist into the dirty green metal, crumpling the construct around his fist like it was tinfoil. A sudden explosion of pain in all four of his main fingers signaled that odds are he would be walking around in a cast for the next few weeks, but he didn't really car. He wanted to pull out his EMR and fry the nearest person, kick a tree down and stomp it to death, light something on fire and use it to light something *else* ablaze.  
  
And then, it a sudden impactful understanding, a click that happened in his mind and rushed all the way down into his chest, his anger melted away and was replaced by worry. An intelligent tactician in her own right, Yuffie's anger was obviously steering her actions more than her mind as she continued her vigilante search. She was searching for an assassin by going into his own territory, an act which was stupid enough without the standing fact that *she was a target*. A mouse hunting a cat was bad enough, but doing it in a litter box was suicide.  
  
Exhaling deeply, Reno realized it was decision time. He could move on as he had been doing for the last year, simply jump aboard a ship and make his way back to bigger cities... or he could chase after Yuffie, and go through the agony of putting down anchor once and for all. Groaning, he sprinted down the street, and hoped she hadn't made too many turns off the road.  
  
***  
  
Still fuming, Yuffie turned left, practically chewing through the inside of her cheek. She had no idea what Reno had been doing in the lower class district of Wutai, but she didn't like any of the possible implications. Did he have a home there? An apartment that he had been planning to slink back to all along after he had achieved... whatever his goal had been?   
  
Or is it possible, a mean little voice spoke up in the back of her head, speaking with the venomous backing of logic, that he was doing the same thing that you were doing? Searching for answers, searching for the killer, or killers? She probably should have heard him out when he tried to give an explanation for his early morning retreat, but if she had heard him use the word 'space' or 'mistake' just once, that would have been it. She would have had to kill him.  
  
She groused onwards, becoming rapidly aware of the fact that she rarely visited this part of her native city. She felt a little guilty to that effect, even as an unwilling princess she should be courteous enough to give all areas equal attention, but she couldn't really be blamed. It wasn't like anything was offered here of value, even the brand name items at low, low, impossible to be legal prices being something she much preferred to steal herself rather than buy from another thief.   
  
Yuffie went to round another corner, only to be confronted by a pair of hushed voices, stopping her dead in her tracks. Out of all things, she most wanted to be left alone, and walking in on a shady deal would lead to the long exposure of an armed arrested. Besides, one of the voices was distinctly feminine, and one of the few crimes- such as shoplifting- that Yuffie thought was too low grade to punish was prostitution.  
  
"I just don't see why we're waiting around here," the girl piped up, the volume of her voice heightened by indignation, and with sudden dart of shock Yuffie recognized it. It was a voice that she hadn't heard for years, since a subway station below Midgar where her and the other members of Avalanche sent the owner of the voice scurrying away under an onslaught of bullets and sword strokes. With wide eyes, Yuffie sidled against the wall, and peered around the corner.  
  
Two people stood in the clearing, as the overheard conversation would indicate. The man was pale, his silky black hair falling back over his shoulders and dipping down into the raised collar of his shirt. Though his back was to Yuffie, the features of the woman told the thief all the she knew. Short cut blonde hair curved around delicate cheeks, and nervous eyes wavered back and forth, never quite managing to meet those of the man she was speaking to.   
  
Both were wearing navy blue suits, the color dulled with age.  
  
Yuffie slid back around the corner and fell back against the wall, breathing hard. Now she had a pretty good idea of where Reno had been that morning, though she doubted it was where he would have told her. There was no way that with all his phone calls, all his visits, all his so-called pulled strings he wouldn't have heard that the people he was seeking were in such close proximity. That son of a bitch...  
  
She couldn't take them both. As prideful as Yuffie was, she could figure that out just by the gleam of guns around the waists of both Turks. She would go back, back to the decent part of the city, find her father and tell him everything. He would have these people rounded up within hours, and as far as Reno goes... well, if he was stupid enough to allow himself to get caught as well, he deserved what he got. She began to walk off, distracted by her thoughts, not as quiet as she should have been.  
  
"Hey, I think someone's there..." came a voice, and then she was off, running, hoping against the odds that she would be able to backtrack the random route she had taken to get here. Her feet smacked loudly against the ground as she fled, so even if the man walking down the street in the opposite direction was the sort who made noise, she wouldn't have heard him. As it was, she didn't, and was within ten feet of the well muscled man before looking up.  
  
"Rude?" she asked in what was almost in a gasp, stopping dead.  
  
He froze at her words, and even behind his sunglasses she could tell his eyes had widened in surprise. His fingers were playing on the handle of his pistol as he opened his mouth- maybe in surprise and maybe to speak- but she was taking off against before it became clear which, realizing she was now outrunning not only another man but a potential bullet to the back of the neck. Rude watched her flee for a moment, and then with a resolute sigh took after her, running with the speed of a professional linebacker.   
  
Already winded, Yuffie knew she didn't have a the slightest chance of escaping a fresh pursuer, but that didn't stop her from putting everything she had into her flight. If they were going to catch her, well, they were going to work for it. She ducked down another alley way and saw, to her eternal relief, that it lead to the main road of the district. It brought her considerable less pleasure, however, when she felt her foot catch on God-knows-what sort of trash, and she went sprawling onto the ground, slicing her palms up considerably.   
  
Rude was there in a second, but he didn't come alone, a streak of black meeting the streak of blue from the other end of the alleyway. Of course there was a little mix of red and white in there, but that didn't change the result of the collision at all. Rude's own momentum took his off his feet as a lowered shoulder struck him in the chest, and drove him down into the ground like a professional. Things got exponentially more amateurish as the tackler himself slipped and fell backwards, but that did none to dull the surprise and confusion of Yuffie Kisaragi.   
  
"Reno!?" she cried. "You... I..."  
  
"Go!" he exploded from his less than dignified position on the ground, as if his instruction should have been obvious. Realizing that indeed it should have been, Yuffie took off once again, wondering why so much in her life required running since she had met the red haired Turk. Rude, seeming to feel that capture had just become impossible, watched her go before slowly dragging himself to his feet. Rubbing his back painfully, Reno did the same, and the bald man fixed him with a long, slow look.  
  
"What," he remarked calmly, "the fuck was that about?"  
  
"Figured it would be better for her health if she got away," Reno remarked, wiping the dirt of the ground off of him. "You run like a girl."  
  
"Why exactly would it be better for her health?" Rude asked, forcing himself to ignore Reno's tacked on comment. Before Reno could even consider answering, three gun shots rang out, not loud enough to be aimed at them but close enough that it was within the running distance of the Wutain girl. Reno stared at Rude, his jaw dropped, and Rude shot a blank stare right back.  
  
"Sorry," Reno muttered, and leapt forward. He batted Rude's arm to the side and seized hold of the pistol the man wore on his hip, ripping it free of its holster but not raising the barrel. He adjusted his aim a half inch and fired, causing Rude to cry out in pain as his right foot exploded in blood in shredded leather. The bald Turk crumpled around his injured appendage, and without another word Reno sprinted off in the direction of the previous shots, the gun still in hand, not exactly sure what he would find.  
  
Not exactly sure he wanted to know. 


	10. Chapter Ten: Saying Goodbye

It didn't matter how good looking you actually were, a voice said quietly in the back of Reno's head as he surveyed the carnage in front of him, lying sprawled in a puddle of blood was incredibly unattractive. As difficult as it was, the former Turk tore his eyes from Yuffie's laid out form and raised them to fall upon the still figured of Elena and Tseng, who stood quite still with smoking pistols still clenched in their hands.  
  
He couldn't believe it. Out of all things, out of all the ways he had expected this tangled situation to end up, this had never entered his mind. Somehow it didn't seem entirely fair, not so much in the deed but in the fact that he hadn't even seen it unfold, that he hadn't figured it out until the end. That, after everything was said and done, he had been of no help whatsoever in preventing the murder of Yuffie Kisaragi.  
  
Showing his trademark lack of emotion, Tseng stepped lightly over the cooling puddles of blood that dotted the pavement ground, apparently more afraid of having blood on his shoes than on his hands. He placed his foot on one of the few unstained parts of the immobile corpse and kicked hard, flipping it over onto its back. Brown eyes stared lifelessly up at the darkening sky, lips parted never to speak again, and crimson blood congealed in the thick black hairs of the victim's beard.  
  
"Hey Turkey," came a steady but clearly pained whisper from the ground, where Yuffie lay clutching her leg. "Are you going to help me up, or am I going to have to crawl over there and punch you in the shin?"  
  
Nodding slowly, Reno tossed Rude's gun aside and walked over to her, walking carelessly through the blood that Tseng had just avoided. He knelt down and allowed Yuffie to hook her arm over the back of his neck, grabbing her around the waist and lifting her up into the air, holding her like a child with her legs dangling over his arm, the steady drip of blood from her leg splattering against the ground. The noise caught Elena's attention, who to Reno's immense shock didn't even pale. "Your going to want to get some medical attention for that," she said, "but I don't think you're in too much danger."  
  
"I don't really want to admit it," Yuffie said with laborious breaths, "but I'm confused, babe."  
  
"Babe?" Reno gave the woman in his arms a quick look. "I knock over one bald man who's chasing you down and you go from screaming at me to pet names?"  
  
"Shut up," Yuffie replied tersely, "and explain."  
  
"You can't just spread around someone else's business card at the scene of a murder and not pay for it," Reno replied quickly, "but I didn't think-"  
  
"-didn't think what?" Tseng cut him off with a sharp tone in his voice. "That we had the resources to hear about it so soon, to get over here to fast? Or maybe you thought that we would just let it slide? We might not have as much money anymore, Reno, but we still have our pride."  
  
What could he say to that? Reno readjusted his grip on the bleeding princess in his arms and turned away from Tseng, towards the sound of an entrance that was anything but silent. Holding a wall for balance, but still hobbling considerably, was Rude, his holster empty and his foot a bloody mess. Elena let loose a gasp of surprise and ran over to him, dropping down to one knee to examine his wound as the bald man glared daggers at Reno through askewed sunglasses.  
  
"If you'd been like that when I chased you away from Chekov's house," Reno remarked quietly, tempting fate but not really caring, "I would have been able to catch you."  
  
"You didn't chase me away from Chekov's," Rude remarked, grunting in pain as Elena ripped the sleeve off her blue jacket and began to wrap it around his damaged foot. "You chased him." He gestured towards the bullet ridden corpse that now lay face up in the alley, it's chest blown to pieces. Elena's aim has been improving, Reno observed, her bullet had landed just an inch to the left of the center of the heart- also known as the point that Tseng's bullet had landed. "And so did I," Rude continued slowly, "but he got away from both of us."  
  
"You saw Rude at Chekov's!?" Yuffie demanded, and if she could have done it without crumpling to the ground in agony Reno was fairy sure she would have dropped down and kicked him. "Thanks for telling me." She paused, putting the puzzle pieces together in her mind. "Oh... so that's why there was no Turk card at his house. You were there waiting for the assassin, and chased him off."  
  
"We can't have an amateur tainting our name with shoddy work," Tseng said coolly, "shots to the back of the neck are so risky. Permanent paralysis doesn't do much in the way of fulfilling a murder contract."  
  
"So who was it?" Reno asked, leaning back against the nearest brick wall. Yuffie was light, but he had been doing far too much running tonight, and his lungs were about ready to rebel against him and burrow out of his chest. "I mean, who would have access to those old cards? Shin-Ra only gave them out at his executive business parties."  
  
"Don't recognize him?" Tseng asked. "I guess lipo-suction goes a long way these days. I figured the beard would be a dead give away."  
  
Peering closer, Reno realized he was right. It would be hard to forget that face, even if he hadn't seen it every day, even if he hadn't had his attention drawn to it every five minutes by bursts of thick, braying laugher. "Heidegger?" he asked in disbelief. "I thought he was dead... but a hitman?"  
  
"It beats living on welfare," Tseng said, his icy eyes falling on Reno. "For some of us."  
  
"So..." Yuffie said quickly in an effort to diffuse the rapidly growing tension between the two, and distract herself from the neat little piercing that had been added to her lower leg, the single shot gotten off by her would-be hitman before Tseng and Elena had sent him to the Lifestream. "Since Rude and I are both crippled, I guess we're heading to the same place... the hospitals almost amount a mile away."  
  
"Heading to the same place?" Tseng seemed to be thoughtful as he spoke. "No, we aren't." His eyes met Reno's, and for a long time they both simply stared, neither looking away. "Not yet, anyway."  
  
Using the words of his former mentor as a cue, Reno swung Yuffie's bulk around and walked out of the clearing and into the street, making his way quickly down the road and in the direction of the Wutain hospital. He didn't look back, but Yuffie did, peering over his shoulder as he bore her away like some action hero carrying the damsel in distress. She watched as three people in blue, only two men, only two standing erect, gathered together to watch them leave.   
  
Two weeks later...  
  
"You never should have left."  
  
Reno smirked through the bile that threatened to rush into his mouth, eyes sparkling with barely contained malice. In tiny numbers written in fire in the back of his mind he counted backwards from ten, breathing evenly. In through the mouth, out through the nose. Two months ago he would have just shot the man in the knee. Yuffie was having a bad influence on him already.  
  
"I never should have done a lot of things, Tseng," he responded as evenly as he could, wondering if those little veins behind your eyes could actually burst in a crimson haze. "Several of my tattoos come to mind. That stripper in Junon. That wedding in Fort Condor. I could go on."  
  
"Please don't." Whatever the new financial situation of the Turks was, the arrogant tone of their leader was as firmly in place as ever. Reno remembered when that voice would install some sort of battle fervor in the back of his mind. Now it felt like a rusty sawblade going to work somewhere between his navel and his knees.  
  
"Listen," Reno started without much hope his words would be even listened to, "there's nothing you can offer me anymore. Nothing you can do. I set you up in that god damned fortress of one of the victims, so you can't even pretend I owe you anything."  
  
"You'll get bored," Tseng said past a glass and through a mouthful of brandy. "What are you going to do, take a job tossing punks on the bottom floor of the Pagoda?"  
  
"Maybe." Tseng searched Reno's eyes for any sign of jest, found none, and exhaled sharply as he shook his head.   
  
"Well, I guess we don't have anything else to talk about," the Turk leader said at last. He watched silently as Reno finished his drink, went to finish another one, and decided to skip the middle man by taking a long drag right from the bottle. Reno handed it back to his former instructor and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.  
  
"Then why are you still here?"  
  
"...you belong with us, Reno. We're your family. The Turks are your home."  
  
Reno thought long and hard about that. Thought about being drug from a gutter and cleaned off, only to be covered with a whole new kind of dirt. Thought about having his empty stomach filled, his wounds healed, his addictions supplied. Tseng had saved his life at least a dozen times, Rude twice that. He'd exchanged more blood with these people than most vampires. They'd been the best thing to ever happen to him.  
  
"Tseng?" he said softly.  
  
"Yes?" the answer was eager, expectant.  
  
"I already have a home. Get the fuck out of here."  
  
Their eyes met one final time, but for the first time that Reno could ever remember Tseng looked away first. He tossed a wad of gil down on the table- easily more than enough to cover the drinks, but no longer enough to buy Reno's soul. "This bar is terrible anyway," he muttered, and was gone in a flash of silk suit and silkier hair.  
  
Reno sighed, ignoring the roll of money completely and paying for his own drink. Some bar maid was going to have a hell of a tip waiting for her when she got back. He leaned down and snatched up the box he'd had sitting at the foot of the table, the box Tseng had brought with him but never addressed. He couldn't have been less surprised by the contents if he'd put them their himself. Dark blue pants, a navy jacket, and a Mako .45.  
  
He carried the box out in front of him like a favorite niece or nephew as he left the bar that Rude had always loved so much. He figured that give or take a few hundred years, he might get used to the place in a life time. Location was important after all. Reno made his way down the street drawing the same old looks he always drew, catching the same old instant judgments. He smiled at the men and women condemning him in their minds.  
  
His path lead easily to a front door he had become readily accustomed to. He couldn't really said he'd moved in, he reasoned. After all, he'd taken up residence here weeks ago to help solve a little problem with an attempted total overthrow of the current government system. Low grade stuff, really. After that little issue had been cleared up, he had simply not left. He had a patient to nurse back to health, after all.  
  
Arms filled, he nudged the door open with his foot. He went to step inside, but something caused him to pause. The box in his hands weighed him down like an anchor around his neck. Taking a deep breath, he glanced through the doorway, scanning the comfort furniture and the incredibly irritating art. The piles of clothes. The TV they'd left on to some random martial arts movie.  
  
One pair of pants. One jacket. One Mako .45.  
  
Reno smirked and plucked the gun from the box. It had a hell of a balance to it, even if the recoil on these things always had bugged the hell out of him. There wasn't nearly enough. When he was blowing holes in something or someone, he wanted to feel some kick. The gun was tucked into the back of his belt, he no longer wore a holster to support one.  
  
He dropped the box like it was hot, watching it clatter against the steps that lead to the house and tumble downwards with detached amusement. His hands now free, he was able to easily shut the door behind him as he stepped into his home.  
  
Eventually, the wind caught the box, and carried it off into the past from whence it came.  
  
Inside the house, Reno was eager to find his future.  
  
~End. 


End file.
